ACADEMIA

Members of the Open Science Grid Council announced today the election of the first OSG Executive Director and Council Chair, and the appointment of the first Executive Board, which will lead the operation and expansion of the Open Science Grid. The OSG is a nationwide community grid built by research groups from United States universities and national laboratories that enables collaborative research through distributed computing technologies. Executive Director Ruth Pordes became involved in scientific grid computing in its infancy as one of the principal investigators of the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Particle Physics Data Grid, and was one of the leaders of the nationwide Grid3 infrastructure that evolved into the OSG. "The OSG is an exciting opportunity and a great challenge," said Pordes, an employee of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "I look forward to the work of the next two years, and to helping our users make exciting scientific discoveries." Council Chair William Kramer, General Manager of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has extensive experience managing large projects and divisions at NASA and at NERSC. "It's been gratifying to see the OSG grow over the past year, adding new members, new partners and new technologies, and I look forward to building on our successes," said Kramer. The OSG Consortium includes 28 member organizations representing more than 50 institutions and hundreds of researchers. Over the past year, OSG researchers have provided distributed computing, storage and network resources to projects in several scientific domains, including particle, nuclear and gravitational-wave physics, astronomy and bioinformatics. "I've seen a great many people putting in extraordinary amounts of effort to make the OSG happen," said Applications Coordinator Frank Würthwein, who, as chair of the OSG's Interim Executive Board, guided the project for the past year. "We are fortunate to have such experienced and senior people within our management team." The Executive Board comprises scientists from universities and national laboratories across the country: Paul Avery, University of Florida; Alan Blatecky, Renaissance Computing Institute; Rob Gardner, University of Chicago; Mark L. Green, University at Buffalo; Leigh Grundhoefer, Indiana University; John Huth, Harvard University; Albert Lazzarini, Caltech; Miron Livny, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Doug Olson, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Don Petravick, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; Alain Roy, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Torre Wenaus, Brookhaven National Laboratory; Mike Wilde, Argonne National Laboratory; and Frank Würthwein, University of California, San Diego. "The OSG has been deploying an extensive suite of grid resources and approaches that can be quickly leveraged by many scientific domains," said Engagement Coordinator Alan Blatecky, a new OSG member. "I anticipate helping OSG engage new science communities and develop new collaborative partnerships over the next year." "The OSG opens up exciting opportunities for students to apply powerful computing resources to new problems in science, engineering, and commerce," added Mike Wilde, the OSG's new Education Coordinator. "With OSG access, and training in its use, we envision that more college and high school students, and even visitors at science museums, can experiment with the power of grid computing."