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

分布式网格计算的既定目标是创建一个相互连接的计算机网络，这些计算机可以作为一个整体。这项关于“开放科学网格”（Open Science Grid， OSG）的提案是美国努力创建一个真正无缝的系统的一个组成部分，在这个系统中，分布在全国和世界各地的科学家和学生可以有效地合作。大型强子对撞机（LHC）——位于欧洲核子研究中心（CERN）、位于日内瓦附近的欧洲粒子物理实验室的下一代粒子对撞机，以及位于美国的激光干涉引力波天文台（LIGO）——将产生的海量数据，刺激了物理学家对计算能力的需求。这些项目每年将产生数十拍字节（数百万数十亿字节）的数据，相当于数百万张dvd。物理学家将储存和筛选这些数据至少几十年，以寻找新的现象。从这个角度来看，目前估计地球上每年产生的信息大约有几千拍字节，所以这些项目将产生总数的近1%。要分析所有这些数据，大约需要10万台当今最快的个人电脑，“配备磁带和磁盘存储以及高速网络设备”。OSG的一个目标是使其他科学领域的许多其他项目能够从网格计算中获益

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