14 partnerships

70+ member institutions 30 Virtual Organizations

120 million computation hours since August

2007

Marcia TeckenbrockFermilab Computing Divisionmarcia@fnal.gov

Supercomputing, Austin, Texas November 19 & 20, 2008

Scientists study the interactions between proteins and water to understand how water mediates drug-protein interactions.

Their findings may have a significant impact on the way future drugs are designed.

X-ray crystallography reveals one water molecule (red sphere) near the protein residue of interest (shown in the box).

Image courtesy of Johns Hopkins University

Ana Damjanovic, of the National Institutes of Health & Johns Hopkins University uses the Harvard-developed CHARMM application to model the structure and behavior of molecular systems.

“I’m running many different simulations to determine how much water exists inside proteins and whether these water molecules can influence the proteins,” Damjanovic says. 

OSG experts also helped Ana and her team develop easy-to-run workflow software for submitting jobs to the grid. The researchers were able to focus on science, not on the grid infrastructure.

Scientists are studying proteins in order to design good proteins that can mitigate bad, disease-promoting proteins. This could lead to new treatments and eventually cures for serious diseases, such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, HIV/AIDS and many cancers. 

Image courtesy of Brian Kuhlman, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Brian Kuhlman, Head of the Kulhman Laboratory in the UNC School of Medicine, is one such scientist.He uses the Rosetta applicationto sample different combinations of amino acid sequences and the proteins they form.

Kuhlman’s small research lab is not able to muster the necessary 3,000 CPU hours that is consumed across 10,000 compute jobs for each protein in order to analyze the thousands of different ways it might fold, but with OSG, it can. Kuhlman has not yet designed his good protein, but he’s closer than ever: “We’ve improved protein stability and binding affinity,” he says. OSG has helped Kulhman come a step closer to mitigating disease-causing proteins.

A computationally designed protein that can switch its structure depending on its environment.

Image courtesy of Brian Kuhlman, UNC Chapel Hill

Heavy precipitation and stormy weather known as convective precipitation occurs during spring, summer and early fall as sea breezes combine with mountainous terrain. This type of precipitation is difficult to predict and requires fine-scale atmospheric modeling.

Image courtesy of Weather Research and Forecasting system

Brian Etherton and his colleagues in the Department of Meteorology at the University of North Carolina Charlotte are increasing the accuracy of these storm predictions. They use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) system, a next-generation numerical weather predication system, to model space over the Carolinas under different physical conditions.

The OSG is being used to run ensembles of 16 different climate models to more accurately predict convective precipitation. The ensembles are differentiated by start time and a variety of physical parameterizations, such as air/surface exchanges of heat and moisture.

The result is a far more accurate forecast than a single model.

Image courtesy of Weather Research and Forecasting system

Scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) are trying to detect ripples in the fabric of space and time. It is thought that far-off astronomical events, such as the collision of two neutron stars, will produce these ripples. Their characteristics will give us detailed information about the event that took place.

Image courtesy of LIGO

Britta Daudert is the head of the LIGO-Grid application team at Caltech. She workson porting the Einstein@Home application, and others to the OSG. E@H uses available computing cycles from contributing members to help process LIGO detector data.

The OSG provides Britta with the compute cycles she needs to test these applications, making them work in a grid environment, thus increasing the compute power available for analyzing gravitational wave data.

Screensaver for the Einstein@Home project member.

Image courtesy of LIGO Scientific Collaboration

Scientists study elementary particle collisions at high energies in order to understand their characteristics. The results from such experiments improve our understanding of elementary particle theories, the origins of dark matter, and other mysteries of the universe.

Jim ShankBoston University,US ATLAS Collaboration

Lothar BauerdickFermilabUS CMS Collaboration

Members of the LHC collaborations ATLAS and CMS use OSG to analyze their immense amount of data in order to obtain their results, relying on the OSG as the US infrastructure on which the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) depends.

OSG provides ATLAS and CMS with more than 30% of their worldwide processing cycles.

In Year 1 of OSG operations, 4 PB of data were moved for CMS for distributed tests between Tier-0, Tier-1 and Tier-2 sites. ATLAS moved more than 30 TB.

Both experiments stored over 10 PB of data across 7 storage sites in 2006 & 2007.

The Remote Operations Center at Fermilab interfaces with the LHC experiments at CERN.

The Tevatron experiments at Fermilab, CDF and D0 have also made extensive use of the OSG.

These experiments analyze data and run simulations. Comparisons between the two help to detect new phenomena. Currently, the experiments are racing to discover the Higgs boson—the particle that could help explain dark matter, dark energy and why particles have mass.

Recently, CDF and D0 have combined their results and with the help of OSG, they have narrowed the expected range of the mass of the mass of the Higgs. This means they are even closer to finding the elusive particle.

Rare particles and phenomena require more data, which in turn, requires more processing power that the OSG can provide.

In 2007, OSG provided 300,000 CPU-hours to DZero for one of the most precise measurements to date of the mass of the top quark

In 2006, OSG helped CDF experimenters precisely measure how fast quarks in the Bs particle switched between their matter and antimatter states.

Scientists continue to make use of the OSG as a tool to explore new avenues of research.