Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a large, robust computing grid that started primarily as a collection of sites associated with large HEP experiments such as ATLAS, CDF, CMS, and DZero, but has evolved in recent years to a much larger user and resource platform. In addition to meeting the US LHC community's computational needs, the OSG continues to be one of the largest providers of distributed high-throughput computing (DHTC) to researchers from a wide variety of disciplines via the OSG Open Facility. The Open Facility consists of OSG resources that are available opportunistically to users other than resource owners and their collaborators. In the past two years, the Open Facility has doubled its annual throughput to over 200 million wall hours. More than half of these resources are used by over 100 individual researchers from over 60 institutions in fields such as biology, medicine, math, economics, and many others. Over 10% of these individual users utilized in excess of 1 million computational hours each in the past year. The largest source of these cycles is temporary unused capacity at institutions affiliated with US LHC computational sites. An increasing fraction, however, comes from university HPC clusters and large national infrastructure supercomputers offering unused capacity. Such expansions have allowed the OSG to provide ample computational resources to both individual researchers and small groups as well as sizable international science collaborations such as LIGO, AMS, IceCube, and sPHENIX. Opening up access to the Fermilab FabrIc for Frontier Experiments (FIFE) project has also allowed experiments such as mu2e and NOvA to make substantial use of Open Facility resources, the former with over 40 million wall hours in a year. We present how this expansion was accomplished as well as future plans for keeping the OSG Open Facility at the forefront of enabling scientific research by way of DHTC.

Throughout the last decade the Open Science Grid (OSG) has been fielding requests from user communities, resource owners, and funding agencies to provide information about utilization of OSG resources. Requested data include traditional accounting - core-hours utilized - as well as users certificate Distinguished Name, their affiliations, and field of science. The OSG accounting service, Gratia, developed in 2006, is able to provide this information and much more. However, with the rapid expansion and transformation of the OSG resources and access to them, we are faced with several challenges in adapting and maintaining the current accounting service. The newest changes include, but are not limited to, acceptance of users from numerous university campuses, whose jobs are flocking to OSG resources, expansion into new types of resources (public and private clouds, allocation-based HPC resources, and GPU farms), migration to pilot-based systems, and migration to multicore environments. In order to have a scalable, sustainable and expandable accounting service for the next few years, we are embarking on the development of the next-generation OSG accounting service, GRACC, that will be based on open-source technology and will be compatible with the existing system. It will consist of swappable, independent components, such as Logstash, Elasticsearch, Grafana, and RabbitMQ, that communicate through a data exchange. GRACC will continue to interface EGI and XSEDE accounting services and provide information in accordance with existing agreements. We will present the current architecture and working prototype.

The Open Science Grid (OSG) ties together individual experiments' computing power, connecting their resources to create a large, robust computing grid; this computing infrastructure started primarily as a collection of sites associated with large HEP experiments such as ATLAS, CDF, CMS, and DZero. In the years since, the OSG has broadened its focus to also address the needs of other US researchers and increased delivery of Distributed High Through-put Computing (DHTC) to users from a wide variety of disciplines via the OSG Open Facility. Presently, the Open Facility delivers about 100 million computing wall hours per year to researchers who are not already associated with the owners of the computing sites; this is primarily accomplished by harvesting and organizing the temporarily unused capacity (i.e. opportunistic cycles) from the sites in the OSG. Using these methods, OSG resource providers and scientists share computing hours with researchers in many other fields to enable their science, striving to make sure that these computing power used with maximal efficiency. We believe that expanded access to DHTC is an essential tool for scientific innovation and work continues in expanding this service.

To assess the tuberculosis (TB) situation in the tribal community of Car Nicobar island 15 years after the national TB programme was implemented in this area after an intensive phase of TB control in 1986. The entire population of Car Nicobar was enumerated through a house-to-house survey. Children aged <14 years were tuberculin tested and read for reaction sizes. Individuals aged >15 years were asked about the presence of chest symptoms (cough, chest pain, and unexplained fever for two weeks or longer and haemoptysis), and sputum samples were collected from patients with chest symptoms. Sputum samples were examined for presence of acid-fast bacilli. Among the 4,543 children enumerated, 4,351 (95.8%) were tuberculin tested and read. Of the 981 children without bacille Calmette-Guerin scars, 161 (16.4%) were infected with TB. A total of 77 cases who were smear-positive for TB were detected from among 10,570 people aged >15 years; the observed smear-positive case prevalence was 728.5 per 100,000. The standardized prevalence of TB infection, annual risk of TB infection, and prevalence of cases smear-positive for TB were 17.0%, 2.5%, and 735.3 per 100,000, respectively. The prevalence of TB infection and smear-positive cases of TB increased significantly between 1986 and 2002. Such escalation took place despite the implementation of the national TB programme on this island, which was preceded by a set of special anti-TB measures that resulted in sputum conversion in a substantially large proportion of the smear-positive cases prevalent in the community. The most likely reason for the increase seems to be the absence of a district TB programme with enough efficiency to sustain the gains made from the one-time initial phase of special anti-TB measures. High risk of transmission of TB infection currently observed on this island calls for a drastic and sustained improvement in TB control measures.

During the last decade, large-scale federated distributed infrastructures have been continually developed and expanded. One of the crucial components of a cyber-infrastructure is an accounting service that collects data related to resource utilization and identity of users using resources. The accounting service is important for verifying pledged resource allocation per particular groups and users, providing reports for funding agencies and resource providers, and understanding hardware provisioning requirements. It can also be used for end-to-end troubleshooting as well as billing purposes. In this work we describe Gratia, a federated accounting service jointly developed at Fermilab and Holland Computing Center at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Open Science Grid, Fermilab, HCC, and several other institutions have used Gratia in production for several years. The current development activities include expanding Virtual Machines provisioning information, XSEDE allocation usage accounting, and Campus Grids resource utilization. We also identify the direction of future work: improvement and expansion of Cloud accounting, persistent and elastic storage space allocation, and the incorporation of WAN and LAN network metrics.

Lepto Dri Dot is a new card agglutination test developed by the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute for the rapid diagnosis of leptospirosis. We evaluated the test in field conditions in The Andaman Islands. Patients suspected of leptospirosis who attended three primary health centres were included in the study. The test results were compared with blood culture or microscopic agglutination tests on paired serum samples; 74 of 124 patients were diagnosed as having leptospirosis based on these criteria. Lepto Dri Dot had a sensitivity of 67.6% (50/74) and a specificity of 66.0% (33/50) during week 1. During weeks 2–4 the values increased to 85.5% (47/55) and 80% (40/50) respectively. An IgM ELISA was also performed on the serum samples for comparison and this was marginally less sensitive, but more specific, during the first week of illness. The positivity rates for the Dri Dot test during days 2–3, 4–5 and 6–7 were 53.1% (17/32), 75.0% (18/24) and 83.3% (15/18), respectively. The corresponding values for ELISA were 28.1% (9/32), 54% (13/24) and 77.8% (14/18). Both Dri Dot and ELISA showed good agreement with the standard diagnostic criteria after the first week of illness (κ = 0.65 and 0.74, respectively). The overall concordance of the two tests was 89.5% (κ = 0.79). The test does not require special storage or sophisticated equipment and can be performed by relatively low skilled personnel.

A study was conducted with the objective of assessing the leptospiral carrier state and seroprevalence among animal population of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. A total of 494 sera samples from different domestic animals and 85 samples from rats (Rattus rattus) were tested by microscopic agglutination test using nine serogroups prevalent in these islands. Antibodies to leptospires were detected in 164 samples giving an overall seroprevalence of (33·11%). The seroprevalence was highest among cows (40·32%). Of 85 rat (Rattus rattus) samples tested for antileptospiral antibodies six (7·1%) were positive. Leptospires were isolated from kidney of two rats and urine of one cow. Isolate from urine of cow was heavily contaminated and was subsequently lost during further subculture. The two isolates were found to be pathogenic, belonging to serogroup Grippotyphosa. The isolates were further characterized by using a set of monoclonal antibodies. The agglutination patterns of isolates were similar to that of ratnapura and valbuzzi, however these did not completely match.

Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Union Territory of India, is home to six primitive tribes. Preliminary serological studies carried out earlier among the four accessible tribes revealed that hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is hyper-endemic among them. The present study was carried out to understand important modes of transmission and to identify possible risk factors associated with HBV infection among the Nicobarese tribe. The epidemiology of HBV infection in these islands appears to be distinct with a high prevalence of the chronic carrier state (22·2%) associated with a comparable proportion of the population being anti-HBs positive (26·3%). More than half of the HBsAg and anti-HBs negative individuals have anti-HBc antibodies. Age, past history of hospital admission, intramuscular injections and number of carriers in the tuhet were found to be significantly associated with exposure to hepatitis B virus. Horizontal transmission through close contact with carriers and perinatal route appears to be an important mode of transmission of HBV in this community. Besides this, use of unsafe injections represents an independent risk factor for acquiring HBV infection in this population. Introducing HBV vaccine in the infant immunization programme and improving injection safety would help to control the infection in the tribal community of these islands.

In vitro micropropagation of holy basil (Ocimum sanctum L.), an Indian medicinal herb, has been accomplished on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium utilizing young inflorescence explants. MS supplemented with 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) or thidiazuron (TDZ) produced only non-morphogenetic callus. Direct multiple shoots differentiated within 2-3 weeks when explants were cultured on MS containing 6-benzyl aminopurine (BAP). Of the various levels of BAP tested, MS + BAP (1.0 mgl-1) produced the maximum number of shoots. Incorporation of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) (0.05 mgl-1) along with BAP (1.0 mgl-1) in the culture medium showed a marked increase in the number of shoots. About 92% of the in vitro regenerated shoots rooted on MS hormone-free medium within 2-3 weeks of culture and 85% of the micropropagated plantlets could be successfully established in soil, where they grew normally.

Leptospirosis is an important public health problem in the Andaman Islands. The disease is being increasingly reported among children and adolescents in recent times. An attempt was made to find out the level of exposure to leptospires, to estimate the incidence of infection and to identity the risk factors for acquiring infection among children. A sample of 1544 schoolchildren was selected. Presence of anti-leptospiral antibodies was tested using the microscopic agglutination test (MAT). Students were interviewed for behavioural factors. In total, 341 (221 seronegative and 120 seropositive) students were followed up clinically and serologically during a subsequent outbreak. An overall seropositivity rate of 23·6% (95% CI 21·54–25·81) was observed. Infection rate was 33·5% among seronegatives whereas re-infection rate was 16·7% among seropositives during the outbreak that occurred 1 month after the first sample collection. Morbidity and mortality were found to be higher among seronegative individuals than serpositives, More than 90% of leptospiral infections were found to be subclinical or unnoticed. The high level of exposure among the children results in high infection rates and because they have less previous exposure than adults, they do not have sufficient protection to resist clinical illness during outbreaks.