Distributed Research Communities, GIS, and the Open Science Grid
National Science Foundation TeraGrid Workshop on Cyber-GIS,
2-3 February 2010 – Washington, DC
Ruth Pordes
“Starting from an initial grass-roots effort between NSF and DOE projects around 2001, a collaboration of domain and computer scientists, software developers, and IT came together to form the Open Science Grid Consortium (OSG) in 2005. The Consortium aims to support common end-to-end distributed computing solutions for a broad set of research communities. The OSG provides computing services, software and support for its members. Communities can build and operate their own autonomous Cyberinfrastructures (CIs), selecting which services and/or software they depend on from the OSG. The Consortium has also built a shared, nationally distributed infrastructure to which a community or computing facility can connect its resources. The federated model to which the OSG works allows for each CI to be independent or integrated as much as desired. OSG services and software are currently used by more than twelve research communities, more than seventy universities and laboratories, and more than six campus/regional infrastructures. While mainly in the US, there are several sites in Central and South America, Taiwan, Korea and, most recently, China.”
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