The Ghana Grid Computing School will be held at Kwame Nkrunah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, August 6-8, 2012. The school will be led by DOSAR, the Distributed Organization of Scientific and Academic Research, which has partnered successfully in the past with institutions in Brazil and South Africa to establish customized grid sites and conduct tutorials on grid applications and operation. The school program will be aimed primarily at doctoral students and on students finishing their last year of university studies, but young researchers will also be encouraged to apply. This school will serve as an opportunity for US students and professional physicists to interact with their counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa and to form collaborations and partnerships in the domain of Grid Computing, which is central to the analysis of several large-scale experiments with world-wide collaborations, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. The school will make use of Open Science Grid computing software infrastructure that has been developed with U.S. funding agency support (including NSF: PHY/PIF and OCI. The grid computing technology harnesses available computing resources and can be immediately used for other areas of scientific research and education, in addition to a wide range of sectors in society as a whole. The program is supported jointly by NSF Division of Physics, through its programs in Elementary Particle Physics Experiment and Education and Interdisciplinary Research, and the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering through its Global Venture Fund.
The grid computing school was offered for three days, August 6 – 8, 2012, immediately following the ASP12, supported by the US National Science Foundation, The University of Texas at Arlington, Louisiana Tech University and University of Oklahoma in addition to the ASP support funds. Given the LHC experiments’ efforts in harnessing computing powers into a world-wide computing grid, the school of computing grid we offered was a perfect match for the fundamental idea of ASP. The grid computing portion focused on hands-on exercises which preceded by a lecture that provide fundamental ideas and the tools. A total of 56 students participated in the grid computing school. In preparation of the school, about 50 linux computers have been set up at KNUST. These computers were setup for grid computing environment ahead of the school. Some of the instructors arrived at KNUST a day early to confirm and verify the setup. Various TWiKi pages were prepared beforehand to facilitate students’ learning process. The school had three focal areas of the computing grid technology: high throughput computing with Condor, workload management, glide-in and security system, distributed remote storage system and the use of computing grid technology in physics analysis. Students appreciated the in-depth grid computing lessons. This was demonstrated clearly in a separate survey conducted after the school in which over 97% of the students wanted the computing grid school to be offered as a regular program in future ASP. In addition, as an additional result of the ASP2012, one of the participants , Mr. Chucks Bright, applied and has been admitted to the University of Texas at Arlington's physics Ph.D. program with a full assistantship, beginning Fall of 2013. UTA faculty member, Jaehoon Yu, has worked closely with the student and with the admissions committee in UTA physics department to help the student to join the program. Mr. Bright has publisized the successful admission to UTA graduate program, motivating other students to follow the suite. Finally, the upper administrations of the three PI universities have expressed their willingness to continue providing support for future ASP's. Yu also has attracted with the Institute for Basic Science in Korea to join in for the support of the future ASP's. PI Greenwood has also been working with Dell computer Inc. to provide additional support for future ASP's, including material support, such as computers for the participants. In conclusion, the support from NSF for the Ghana ASP2012 has not only made the addition of critical computing technology to the school program but also been very successful resulting in active interactions between selected African students and US institutions. Given the outcome of this program, the NSF support has allowed us to accomplish the goals for the proposal and to impact throughout the broader areas of physics and technology, as well as lives of the students in the new frontier, African Continent! Given the success this proposal brought in, it would be beneficial for this program to continue through the future ASP.
