For the first time, the OSG Virtual School 2021 will open its core lectures live to the public!

The OSG User School is a premier training program for researchers, facilitators, and others who are interested in learning more about how to use High Throughput Computing to advance research. The application deadline to participate fully has passed, but this year the OSG is inviting the public to attend daily lectures and demonstrations during the School’s first week.

The public lectures are excellent learning opportunities for students and researchers who could not be full participants of the School. The sessions are also well suited for those interested in learning more about High Throughput Computing, OSG, HTCondor, or leveraging any of these in their computing research.

Topics include:

• The main concepts of High Throughput Computing (HTC)
• The basics of using HTCondor
• Getting started on OSG, a national distributed HTC infrastructure for Open Science
• How to prepare software for use in HTC systems
• Handling data (input and output) in HTC systems

The Public lectures are held daily, August 2–6 from 2:30–4:00 pm CST. Browse the timetable for a detailed schedule. Registration is open through August 6 and is free, but required.

The lectures will be recorded and posted on the School website eventually, along with the complete set of exercises. While full participants also have priority access to experts, personalized learning plans, and small-group learning sessions, by opening lectures up to the public, a great deal of the School content will be available to everyone.

Attendees of the school will learn to use high throughput computing (HTC) — whether on a local system or using OSG — to run large-scale research simulation, analysis, and other applications for cutting-edge science. Through lecture, demonstration, hands-on exercises, and a personalized learning plan that includes one-on-one and small-group consulting with experienced OSG staff, students will learn to harness HTC systems and apply them to the researcher’s own computational work. The School is ideal for graduate students in any research area for whom large-scale computing is a vital part of the research process; we also consider applications from advanced undergraduates, post-doctoral students, faculty, and staff!

This year’s virtual offering has been tuned for remote participation, with the goal of helping attendees get their own work running within the 2-week period, and is not merely a translation of the in-person program (last offered in 2019).

The Virtual School will be held the weeks of August 2–6 and 9–13. The event is free and materials will be posted publicly. A selective application process was required for full participation, which includes access to HTC experts and to HTC systems via the Center for High Throughput Computing and OSG Connect service (otherwise available to researchers working on a U.S.-based academic, government, or non-profit research project).

While no travel is involved and the schedule allows for some flexibility, accepted applicants were asked to commit at least 20 hours each week. You can view the high-level schedule for 2021, and we expect the detailed schedule and materials to be similar to the OSG Virtual School Pilot 2020.

We hope to return to an in-person OSG User School in 2022.

If you are thinking about applying for 2022, ideal candidates will:

• Be graduate students doing research or support staff helping researchers (but see below)
• Need large amounts of computing, which could transform research or open new paths to discovery
• Have basic experience with the Linux command line (or learn beforehand)
• Be able to commit to at least 20 hours each week for the School dates

Not a graduate student or support staff?

We consider applications from advanced undergraduates, especially those who are involved in graduate-level research or coursework. Also, we consider people in other groups (post-doctoral researchers, faculty, researchers, other staff, etc.), especially if you convince us that this opportunity is likely to have a significant effect on your work or research, or that of others.