Analysis of the Current Use, Benefit, and Value of the Open Science Grid

The Open Science Grid usage has ramped up more than 25% in the past twelve months due to both the increase in throughput of the core stakeholders – US LHC, LIGO and Run II – and increase in usage by non-physics communities. It is important to understand the value collaborative projects, such as the OSG, contribute to the scientific community. This needs to be cognizant of the environment of commercial cloud offerings, the evolving and maturing middleware for grid based distributed computing, and the evolution in science and research dependence on computation. We present a first categorization of OSG value and analysis across several different aspects of the Consortium's goals and activities. And lastly, we presents some of the upcoming challenges of LHC data analysis ramp up and our ongoing contributions to the World Wide LHC Computing Grid.