Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2015
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Employee Art Show reception - today

Back Pain and Spine Surgery Prevention Lunch and Learn - Sept. 24

Wilson Hall southwest elevator offline through Sept. 26

Fermilab Arts Series: 10,000 Maniacs - Sept. 26

English country dancing in Kuhn Barn - Sept. 27

NALWO evening social - Oct. 7

Access 2013: Level 2 / Intermediate - Oct. 7

Excel 2013: Level 2 / Intermediate - Oct. 8

Process Piping Design; Process Piping, Material, Fabrication, Examination, Testing - Oct. 13, 14, 15, 16

Python Programming Basics - Oct. 14, 15, 16

Interpersonal Communication Skills - Oct. 20

Managing Conflict (morning only) - Nov. 4

PowerPoint 2013: Introduction / Intermediate - Dec. 3

Python Programming Advanced - Dec. 9, 10, 11

Internet Explorer upgrade

OS X El Capitan (10.11) not yet certified for Fermilab use

Professional and Organization Development 2015-16 fall/winter course schedule

Fermilab Board Game Guild

Scottish country dancing moves to Kuhn Barn Tuesdays evenings

International folk dancing returns to Kuhn Barn Thursday evenings

Norris Recreation Center employee discount

Outdoor soccer

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Feature

Q&A with Frank Würthwein, Open Science Grid executive director

Frank Würthwein
Photo: Ben Tolo,
San Diego
Supercomputer
Center

Frank Würthwein is the executive director of the Open Science Grid, which facilitates access to high-throughput computing in the United States. On a recent visit to Fermilab, he gave a talk on the outlook for OSG now that it has reached its 10-year anniversary.

In your recent talk at Fermilab you talked about how Open Science Grid is entering into "teenagehood." What do you see as OSG's goals for the next decade?
We've always wanted to be open to all of science, but in the first five or six years, the focus was entirely on getting the LHC to work well. We've since demonstrated successfully what we had always claimed — whatever we do for the LHC will also be useful generically, because computers don't care what the bytes are that they compute on or the programs that they run. We now have data to show that OSG benefits all of science.

The next big challenge in the adolescent years is to have the same kind of success not just in broadening across all of science, but also across all types of institutions. OSG would like to be open to anyone from small colleges to leadership-scale facilities in computing. As a crude estimate, that means gigaflops to exaflops, gigabytes to exabytes — six orders of magnitude. Ultimately we want to manage this range of scale because we want to democratize access to computing. A PI at a small college with a bright idea should be able to consume significant resources and get great science done. They shouldn't be limited by the fact that their institution can't afford to buy them a huge cluster.

OSG connects researchers and institutions through high-throughput computing. How else can researchers benefit from OSG?
We see an opportunity not just to enable science by having resources and connecting things up and doing plumbing, but to produce our own data. The use of OSG in itself, and its performance characteristics, all of this data that we can take and traditionally have not made available or even collected in a coherent fashion — there could be a science interest in that data. We're starting to think about how OSG can become a data creator and not just an access provider. OSG five years from now might be an interesting big-data platform for doing computer science analysis of what the sciences do. And people might be writing papers on our data.

What are OSG and Fermilab's future plans for collaborating on computing?
One of the high-priority projects Fermilab's Scientific Computing Division [SCD] is focusing on right now is the HEP Cloud Facility. Fermilab could be in a position where not all the hardware it needs is on the Fermilab campus. It could transparently use hardware that is here, hardware that is available anywhere on OSG, collaborating with high-performance computing facilities at DOE and NSF, and hardware that it purchased from cloud providers, so that you have a way to have a service-oriented structure as the interface to the facility. Not all the hardware has to be owned by or operated by people on Fermilab payroll. That maps very well onto the objectives of OSG.

SCD and OSG want to accomplish the same thing for this work. Our vision has always been to have transparent computing across the entire nation along multiple lines of policies, computing on things you own, your friends want to share with you, the nation wants to share with you and where you have an allocation. Also computing that you buy. All of this should be transparent. That's exactly the same objective that HEP Cloud has. That will be a big driver of what OSG and Fermilab are going to do together in the next several years.

In the News

Ghost traps: the hunt for dark matter

From Cosmos, Sept. 21, 2015

If you were designing a villain's lair for a James Bond movie, you would be hard pushed to create one as spectacular as Italy's Gran Sasso Laboratory.

To reach it, you follow the A24 motorway west towards Rome as it plunges through a 10-kilometre tunnel drilled below the Gran Sasso National Park, a mountain range that is home to bears, wildcats, wolves, chamois and thousands of summer tourists.

Read more

From ESH&Q

Fire Prevention Week

Chuck Kuhn

Chuck Kuhn, Fermilab fire chief, wrote this column.

Fire Prevention Week is Oct. 4-10, and the Fermilab Fire Department reminds you to be sure your home is outfitted with an operating smoke detector.

This year's Prevention Week theme is "Hear the Beep Where You Sleep!" Statistics show that while 96 percent of American homes have at least one smoke detector, smoke alarms were either absent or not working in two out of five reported house fires. Almost two-thirds of home fire deaths resulted from fires in homes with no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms. More importantly, home fires that occur during sleeping hours result in a significantly higher percentage of serious injury or death where no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms are present.

Your senses of smell and hearing are greatly diminished during sleep, but functioning smoke alarms never sleep. They are your insurance that your family is safe even during slumber.

It is recommended that a smoke alarm be installed outside each bedroom in your home. Change the batteries in these and all other household units at least once a year. Test each and every detector, whether battery-powered or hardwire-installed, once a month.

A home fire escape plan is essential. Every family needs to determine a route out of the house. Household members should also know who might not be awoken by the sound of the alarm. If someone is at risk of sleeping through the alarm, the family needs to assign an adult who wakes easily to rouse the rest of the household, perhaps by yelling "fire," pounding on doors or walls, or blowing a whistle.

So let's check those smoke detectors, get that escape plan in place and make sure you "Hear the Beep Where You Sleep!"

Photo of the Day

Green heron

nature, animal, insect, dragonfly
A green heron enjoys Bulrush Pond. Photo: Bridget Scerini, TD
In Brief

Lego LHC detectors on display in Fermilab library

Mac Olson

Small Lego models of the Large Hadron Collider's four major detectors are currently on display in the Fermilab Library. The models will remain up for roughly another two months.

Mac Olson, a 4th-grade student at Lincoln Elementary in Elmhurst and Lego enthusiast, assembled the models. Visit the library to learn more about his project.

Head to the Fermilab Library to see Lego models of LHC detectors. From left: ALICE, CMS, ATLAS, an LHC magnet and LHCb.
Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, Sept. 22

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q Section, contains two incidents.

An employee cut his left first and little fingers while removing stainless-steel chips from the lathe he was using. He reported to the Medical Office, where bandages were applied.

An employee suffered an osteochondral fracture of his right knee while attending a firefighting training class.

See the full report.