The Open Science Grid (OSG), a major US Grid infrastructure, provides scientists with more than 70 production sites offering over 20,000 CPUs and 4 Petabytes of storage to advance their research. This organisation includes members from particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, gravitational-wave science and computer science collaborations, all contributing to the development of the OSG and benefiting from advances in Grid technology. Applications in other areas of science, such as mathematics, medical imaging and nanotechnology can also gain from the interactions with OSG through its partnership with local and regional Grids or their communities' use of the Virtual Data Toolkit software stack.

The South African Grid School invites participants to learn more about Grid and high throughput computing and its implications in various research areas through this intensive OSG course that introduces the techniques of Grid and distributed computing for science and engineering with hands-on training in the use of large-scale Grid computing resources.

The workshop will focus on enabling the use of OSG and TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing in different application domains. Participants will learn how to use Grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the course completion.

The workshop will cover:

• Overview of distributed computing concepts and tools: Concepts, tools, and techniques of Grid computing and

"Building a Grid"

• Discovering and using Grid resources
• Grid scheduling and distributed data management
• Web service and Grid service concepts including techniques for work flow and collaboration; Grid computing in a South African context; and various high-performance computing related topics.

Undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer science, or any scientific, data-or computing-intensive discipline may apply. Applicants should have at least intermediate programming skills (one to two semesters experience in C/C++, Java, Perl, and/or Python) and hands-on experience with UNIX/Linux in a networked environment.

The course contents of a previous Grid School can be found at

https://twiki.grid.iu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Education/GreatPlainsGridSchool2007</a>

You can register at

http://neo.phys.wits.ac.za/gridschool/GridSchoolSA/Registration.php</a>