Related Facilities
A key focus for iCAIR’s high-performance networking with its international partners is providing high-quality digital communications among computational science sites around the world, including specialized instrumentation (e.g., synchrotrons, radio telescopes, observatories, etc.), supercomputing centers, HPC centers, Grids, national research facilities (e.g., DOE labs) and science clouds, for example, the Open Science Grid, XSEDE, and JetStream.
Open Science Grid
iCAIR participates in the Open Science Grid, operated by the OSG Consortium, and is dedicated to advancing open science via the practice of distributed High Throughput Computing and its state-of-the-art. High-throughput computing (HTC) executes computational work in the form of numerous, self-contained tasks to optimize their overall completion across available computing resources.
High-throughput computing (HTC) executes computational work in the form of numerous, self-contained tasks to optimize their overall completion across available computing resources. Specialized by the OSG, distributed high-throughput computing (dHTC) involves the operation of HTC-optimized infrastructure across many independent, collaborating administrative domains. The OSG provides various open-source software, other technologies, and services for researchers and research organizations to support their dHTC compute requirements. OSG software and technologies allow research organizations to build dHTC systems at-scale from shared computing and data resources and to make these resources available to researchers within virtual clusters (“pools”).
Some pools or participating organizations provide application-specific interfaces or datasets, so researchers may not even be aware of integrating with OSG and its services/technologies. Many OSG technologies and services are based upon or directly leverage the HTCondor Software Suite (HTCSS) and other open-source tools that enable shared computing and data capabilities. A research organization can deploy these to create its own dHTC pool across participating compute and data components, making its federated capacity available to the researchers it serves.
Open Science Data Cloud
iCAIR participates in the Open Science Data Cloud initiative, managed by the Open Commons Consortium (OCC), which operates cloud computing, data commons, and data ecosystems to advance scientific, medical, health care, and environmental research for human and societal impact.
The OCC provides: a) the consortium and project management; b) the legal agreements and governance structure; c) manages and operates the cloud computing infrastructure; and d) manages the security and compliance required.