Sustaining and Extending the Open Science Grid: Science Innovation on a PetaScale Nationwide Facility

The stated goal of distributed Grid Computing is to create a network of interconnected computers that can act as one. This proposal for the 'Open Science Grid' (OSG) is a component of a U.S. effort to create a truly seamless system where scientists and students distributed nationwide and worldwide can effectively collaborate.

Physicists' demand for computing power is being spurred by the flood of data that will pour out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the next-generation particle collider at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, as well as LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the U.S. These projects will produce dozens of petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) of data a year, or the equivalent of millions of DVDs, which physicists will store and sift through for at least a couple of decades in search of new phenomena. To put this in perspective, current estimates of the annual production of information on the planet are on the order of a few thousand petabytes, so these projects will be producing nearly 1% of that total. Some 100,000's of today's fastest personal computers 'with accompanying tape and disk storage and high-speed networking equipment 'will be needed to work together to analyse all of this data.

A goal of the OSG is to enable dozens of other projects in other sciences to reap the benefits of Grid Computing