OSG AHM 2012

This years all hands meeting was a great success!  There where a few sessions that I really enjoyed.

AHM Pictures

Campus Caucus
There where many user engagement people there.  I believe that we reached a consensus that there isn't much an engagement community.

For example, Wisconsin has a great method for distributing and running MATLAB and R application on the OSG, but there has been no knowledge transfer to other engagement folks.  I know a few UNL users that have wanted to run MATLAB on our resources.  If we could move a HCC MATLAB workflow to the Grid, I believe that would be a great success.

I completely agree that there is no Engagement 'community'.  But I think that's true of most of the OSG.  Though, there have been recently many improvements.

• I think the centralized Jira has helped tremendously.  It's very easy to see what other people have been working on and even the general direction of progress.  Though this only works for OSG 'employees' and OSG projects.
• The OSG blogs have been successful for the technology group to explain what they are working on.  Though, I wish they had shorter and more often posts.

I hope that the blogs can be a way to spread the OSG Engagement activity.  It's also a great way to point to code and work that is being done.  Also, blog posts shouldn't be limited to things that the author is doing, but could point to what other people are doing.  For example, I knew nothing about the Rosetta people at Wisconsin until my poster was setup next to theirs and was able to have a conversation.  It would have been great to see some information that of what they where doing outside of the once a year meeting.


Science on the OSG

Talk

I thought this talk by Frank was great.  I felt he had the same feeling that we where all feeling, that Protein processing was becoming a very large user of the OSG.  We've seen this at HCC with both CPASS, CS-Rosetta, and Autodock.  

Walltime usage for non-HEP

Frank also pointed out a graph of usage.  At the end of the graph, there seems to be a plateau.  Possibly we are hitting opportunistic resource limits?

Here's an updated usage graph (source):

Walltime usage for non-HEP updated

 The thing to note is the explosive growth of GLOW VO.  Their usage has increased dramatically recently.

OSG in 2017

Talk

I really liked to see what people thought the OSG would look like in 2017.

Chander's prediction that people will come to us to use the OSG.  I believe this will take a critical mass of users.  I think we have a good product to sell, we just need publicity.  

Chander's comment on data is also important.  But I believe the problem with data isn't necessarily storage, but it's access to the data.  Take for example Dropbox.  For free, they offer very little storage.  The main advantage is that it's accessible from anywhere, laptop, desktop, iphone, web...  I think a uniform data access method can get us a lot further than distributed storage.

Alain's prediction that we will be using more community software.  This will take a large effort to be part of the distribution's community.  I foresee us contributing packages, patches, and effort to Fedora EPEL and possibly Ubuntu.  I think we are making great strides with the packaging, and would like to continue injecting us into the Fedora community.

Nebraska Campus Infrastructure

Talk

Of course, my talk is worth looking at.

This post ended up larger than I was hoping for.   Oh well.

Burning the LiveUSBs

In my last post, I talked about the OSG LiveUSBs.  Now that the conference is next week, I have started burning the USB with the image.

USB Key Piles

I burned 4 USBs at a time, using the script below.  Parted didn't work, never really found out why.  The symptoms where that the USB would not boot, but they where readable by Macs.  So I scripted fdisk.