IT Services joined the nationwide Open Science Grid Consortium (OSG) in support of the National Science & Engineering community. In joining the OSG, older legacy hardware that has been removed from production is used to contribute to the processing and storage capacity of the Open Science Pool (OSPool).
Fair-share access is a core principle of the OSG. Over 100 million CPU hours delivered on the OSG in the past year were contributed by university campuses, government-supported supercomputing facilities, and research collaborations. Sharing allows individual researchers to access larger computing resources and large organizations to keep their utilization high.
The Distributed High – Throughput Computing (dHTC) resources accessible through the OSG are contributed and organized by the community and governed by the OSG. dHTC is a computing paradigm that aims at maximizing useful computation using any available resource located anywhere on the planet. Work is split up and then scheduled on multiple different machines in the pool utilizing all available compute power. In the last 12 months, OSG provided more than 1.2 billion CPU hours to researchers working on a wide variety of projects world-wide.
In conjunction with OSG, the OSPool is designed to support high throughput workloads by providing a source of computing capacity that is accessible to any researcher affiliated with a United States academic institution. UA Little Rock will start contributing to the OSPool as it begins working on OSG research jobs which will be utilizing its shared legacy hardware.
To date, the UA Little Rock OSG nodes (i.e. connection or redistribution points) have contributed over 106,000 computer hours to the OSPool. The UA Little Rock OSG nodes have participated in jobs for scientific fields including astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, gravitational physics, high energy physics, and chemistry.