The open science grid

The U.S. LHC Tier-1 and Tier-2 laboratories and universities are developing production Grids to support LHC applications running across a worldwide Grid computing system. Together with partners in computer science, physics grid projects and active experiments, we will build a common national production grid infrastructure which is open in its architecture, implementation and use. The Open Science Grid (OSG) model builds upon the successful approach of last year's joint Grid2003 project. The Grid3 shared infrastructure has for over eight months provided significant computational resources and throughput to a range of applications, including ATLAS and CMS data challenges, SDSS, LIGO, and biology analyses, and computer science demonstrators and experiments. To move towards LHC-scale data management, access and analysis capabilities, we must increase the scale, services, and sustainability of the current infrastructure by an order of magnitude or more. Thus, we must achieve a significant upgrade in its functionalities and technologies. The initial OSG partners will build upon a fully usable, sustainable and robust grid. Initial partners include the US LHC collaborations, DOE and NSF Laboratories and Universities and Trillium Grid projects. The approach is to federate with other application communities in the U.S. to build a shared infrastructure open to other sciences and capable of being modified and improved to respond to needs of other applications, including CDF, D0, BaBar, and RHIC experiments. We describe the application-driven, engineered services of the OSG, short term plans and status, and the roadmap for a consortium, its partnerships and national focus