User Spotlights

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Mining millions of genomes for the next powerful antibiotic

Interview of Erik Wright, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh and his use of the OSPool.

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Collaborations Between Two National Laboratories and the OSG Consortium Propel Nuclear and High-Energy Physics Forward

Seeking to unlock the secrets of the “glue” binding visible matter in the universe, the ePIC Collaboration stands at the forefront of innovation. Led by a collective of hundreds of scientists and engineers, the Electron-Proton/Ion Collider (ePIC) Collaboration was formed to design, build, and operate the first experiment at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).

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NOAA funded marine scientist uses OSPool access to high throughput computing to explode her boundaries of research

NOAA funded marine scientist uses OSPool access to high throughput computing to explode her boundaries of research.

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Addressing the challenges of transferring large datasets with the OSDF

Aashish Tripathee has used multiple file transfer systems and experienced challenges with each before using the Open Science Data Federation (OSDF). With the OSDF, Tripathee has already seen an improvement in data transfers.

EHT's first black hole image of Sgr A* utilizing polarized light.

Junior researchers advance black hole research with OSPool open capacity

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration furthers black hole research with a little help from the OSPool open capacity.

Map of institutions contributing to the Open Science Pool (OSPool).

“Becoming part of something bigger” motivates campus contributions to the OSPool

A spotlight on two newer contributors to the OSPool and the onboarding process.

Radio image of space.

Through the use of high throughput computing, NRAO delivers one of the deepest radio images of space

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s collaboration with the NSF-funded PATh and Pelican projects leads to successfully imaged deep space.

Image of Hubble Ultra-deep Field at S-Band

Astronomers and Engineers Use a Grid of Computers at a National Scale to Study the Universe 300 Times Faster

Data Processing for Very Large Array Makes Deepest Radio Image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

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Ecologists utilizing HTC to examine the effects of megafires on wildlife

Studying the impact of two high-fire years in California on over 600 species, ecologists enlist help from CHTC.

1937 aerial photo of central UW Madison campus

Preserving historic Wisconsin aerial photos with a little help from CHTC

Associate State Cartographer Jim Lacy works with CHTC to digitize and preserve historical aerial photography for the public.

The OSG School 2023 attendees

OSG School mission: Don’t let computing be a barrier to research

The OSG Consortium hosted its annual OSG School in August 2023, assisting participants from a wide range of campuses and areas of research through HTC learning.

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How the GLUE Lab is bringing the potential of HTC to track the movement of cattle and land use change

Researching land use change in the cattle sector is just one of several large projects where the GLUE Lab is working to apply HTC.

Jonathon Blank, a co-author of the paper

Using HTC expanded scale of research using noninvasive measurements of tendons and ligaments

With this technique and the computing power of high throughput computing (HTC) combined, researchers can obtain thousands of simulations to study the pathology of tendons and ligaments.

Group photo of members of the Hanna Lab

Training a dog and training a robot aren’t so different

In the Hanna Lab, researchers use high throughput computing as a critical tool for training robots with reinforcement learning.

Members of the Spalding Research Lab

Plant physiologists used high throughput computing to remedy research “bottleneck”

The Spalding Lab uses high throughput computing to study plant physiology.

González (left) and Tripathee (right) pictured with their awards. Photo provided by Jimena González.

OSG David Swanson Awardees Honored at HTC23

Jimena González and Aashish Tripathee named 2023’s David Swanson awardees

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Great Plains Regional CyberTeam Expanding Capacity for Computing from Great Plains Campuses

Great Plains Augmented Gateway to the OSG (GP-ARRGO) receives National Science Foundation (NSF) CC* award

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USGS uses HTCondor to advance Mars research

USGS uses HTCondor to pre-process 100,000+ images to enable access to Machine Learning and AI analysis of the Mars surface.

Microscope beside computer by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels.

OSPool As a Tool for Advancing Research in Computational Chemistry

Assistant Professor Eric Jonas uses OSG resources to understand the structure of molecules based on their measurements and derived properties.

Image obtained from the official ASP2022 page on the African School of Physics website.

Distributed Computing at the African School of Physics 2022 Workshop

Over 50 students chose to participate in a distributed computing workshop from the 7th biennial African School of Physics (ASP) 2022 at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa.

Quantum AI Logo. Image from Quantum AI Product Manager Catherine Vollgraff Heidweiller’s research blog post.

Google Quantum Computing Utilizing HTCondor

Google’s launch of a Quantum Virtual Machine emulates the experience and results of programming one of Google’s quantum computers, managed by an HTCondor system running in Google Cloud.

Computer screen with lines of code. Uploaded by AltumCode on Unsplash.

Empowering Computational Materials Science Research using HTC

Ajay Annamareddy, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes how he utilizes high-throughput computing in computational materials science.

Image of two black holes from Cody Messick’s presentation slides.

LIGO's Search for Gravitational Waves Signals Using HTCondor

Cody Messick, a Postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working for the LIGO lab, describes LIGO’s use of HTCondor to search for new gravitational wave sources.

Image of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

The Future of Radio Astronomy Using High Throughput Computing

Eric Wilcots, UW-Madison dean of the College of Letters & Science and the Mary C. Jacoby Professor of Astronomy, dazzles the HTCondor Week 2022 audience.

Using high throughput computing to investigate the role of neural oscillations in visual working memory

Jacqueline M. Fulvio, lab manager and research scientist for the Postle Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains how she used the HTCondor Software Suite to investigate neural oscillations in visual working memory.

Matthew Garcia, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Forest & Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses how he used the HTCondor Software Suite to combine HTC and HPC capacity to perform simulations that modeled the dispersal of budworm moths.

Using HTC and HPC Applications to Track the Dispersal of Spruce Budworm Moths

Matthew Garcia, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Forest & Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses how he used the HTCondor Software Suite to combine HTC and HPC capacity to perform simulations that modeled the dispersal of budworm moths.

For the first time, UW Statistics undergraduates could participate in a course teaching high throughput computing (HTC). John Gillett, lecturer of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, designed and taught the course with the support of the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC).

UW Statistics Course using HTC

For the first time, UW Statistics undergraduates could participate in a course teaching high throughput computing (HTC). John Gillett, lecturer of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, designed and taught the course with the support of the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC).

Justin Hiemstra, a Machine Learning Application Specialist for CHTC’s GPU Lab, discusses the testing suite developed to test CHTC's support for GPU and ML framework compatibility.

Testing GPU/ML Framework Compatibility

Justin Hiemstra, a Machine Learning Application Specialist for CHTC’s GPU Lab, discusses the testing suite developed to test CHTC’s support for GPU and ML framework compatibility.

Photo by Dan Myers on Unsplash

Expediting Nuclear Forensics and Security Using High Throughput Computing

Arrielle C. Opotowsky, a 2021 Ph.D. graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Engineering Physics, describes how she utilized high throughput computing to expedite nuclear forensics investigations.

Computer rendering of DNA. Image credit: Sangharsh Lohakare (@sangharsh_l) on Unsplash.

The role of HTC in advancing population genetics research

Postdoctoral researcher Parul Johri uses OSG services, the HTCondor Software Suite, and the population genetics simulation program SLiM to investigate historical patterns of genetic variation.

Simulated image of Sagittarius A* black hole. Image library credit: EHT Theory Working Group, CK Chan.

High-throughput computing as an enabler of black hole science

The stunning new image of a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way was created by eight telescopes, 300 international astronomers and more than 5 million computational tasks. This Morgridge Institute article describes how the Wisconsin-based Open Science Pool helped make sense of it all.

An aerial view of Jefferson Lab. Photo courtesy of Jefferson Lab.

Expanding, uniting, and enhancing CLAS12 computing with OSG’s fabric of services

A mutually beneficial partnership between Jefferson Lab and the OSG Consortium at both the organizational and individual levels has delivered a prolific impact for the CLAS12 Experiment.

Map of Africa; Mali and Uganda are highlighted where their respective flags point. Image credit: © 2010 Roland Urbanek. Flags are edited in and overlayed on the image.

NIAID/ACE - OSG collaboration leads to a successful virtual training session

The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the African Centers for Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data-Intensive Science (ACE) partnered with the OSG Consortium to host a virtual high throughput computing training session for graduate students from Makerere University and the University Of Sciences, Techniques, and Technologies of Bamako (USTTB).

The GRIFFIN Spectrometer. (Image credit: Kirk Chantraine, TRIUMF Photowalk 2018).

Learning and adapting with OSG: Investigating the strong nuclear force

David Swanson Memorial Award winner, Connor Natzke’s journey with the OSG Consortium began in 2019 as a student of the OSG User School. Today, nearly three years later, Natzke has executed 600,000 simulations with the help of OSG staff and prior OSG programming. These simulations, each of them submitted as a job, logged over 135,000 core hours provided by the Open Science Pool (OSPool). Natzke’s history with the OSG Consortium reflects a pattern of learning, adapting, and improving that translates to the acceleration and expansion of scientific discovery.

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Machine Learning and Image Analyses for Livestock Data

In this presentation from HTCondor Week 2021, Joao Dorea from the Digital Livestock Lab explains how high-throughput computing is used in the field of animal and dairy sciences.

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Harnessing HTC-enabled precision mental health to capture the complexity of smoking cessation

Collaborating with CHTC research computing facilitation staff, UW-Madison researcher Gaylen Fronk is using HTC to improve cigarette cessation treatments by accounting for the complex differences among patients.

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Protecting ecosystems with HTC

Researchers at the USGS are using HTC to pinpoint potential invasive species for the United States.

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Centuries of newspapers are now easily searchable thanks to HTCSS

BAnQ’s digital collections team recently used HTCSS to tackle their largest computational endeavor yet –– completing text recognition on all newspapers in their digital archives.

Ariadna looking over bats in a case

80,000 jobs, 40 billion base pairs, and 20 bats –– all in 4 weeks

An evolutionary biologist at the AMNH used HTC services provided by the OSG to unlock a genomic basis for convergent evolution in bats.

Hero Image for Morgridge Article Courtesy of Morgridge

Resilience: How COVID-19 challenged the scientific world

In the face of the pandemic, scientists needed to adapt. This article by the Morgridge Institute for Research provides a thoughtful look into how individuals and organizations, including the CHTC, have pivoted in these challenging times.

Proton-proton collision

Antimatter: Using HTC to study very rare processes

Anirvan Shukla, a User School participant in 2016, spoke at this year’s Showcase about how high throughput computing has transformed his research of antimatter in the last five years.

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Using HTC for a simulation study on cross-validation for model evaluation in psychological science

During the OSG School Showcase, Hannah Moshontz, a postdoctoral fellow at UW-Madison’s Department of Psychology, described her experience of using high throughput computing (HTC) for the very first time, when taking on an entirely new project within the field of psychology.

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Transforming research with high throughput computing

During the OSG Virtual School Showcase, three different researchers shared how high throughput computing has made lasting impacts on their work.

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Scaling virtual screening to ultra-large virtual chemical libraries

Kicking off the OSG User School Showcase, Spencer Ericksen, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Carbone Cancer Center, described how high throughput computing (HTC) has made his work in early-stage drug discovery infinitely more scalable.

Nebraska standing at graduation

OSG fuels a student-developed computing platform to advance RNA nanomachines

How undergraduates at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln developed a science gateway that enables researchers to build RNA nanomachines for therapeutic, engineering, and basic science applications.

How to Transfer 460 Terabytes? A File Transfer Case Study

When Greg Daues at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) needed to transfer 460 Terabytes of NCSA files from the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3) in Lyon, France to Urbana, Illinois, for a project they were working with FNAL, CC-IN2P3 and the Rubin Data Production team, he turned to the HTCondor High Throughput system, not to run computationally intensive jobs, as many do, but to manage the hundreds of thousands of I/O bound transfers.