The OSG facilitates access to distributed high throughput computing for research in the US. The resources accessible through the OSG are contributed by the community, organized by the OSG, and governed by the OSG consortium.

The Open Science grid consists of computing and storage elements at over 100 individual sites spanning the United States. These sites are primarily at universities and national labs and range in size from a few hundred to tens of thousands of CPU cores. The distributed nature of these resource providers allows users from a single VO to submit their jobs at a single entry point and have them execute at whatever resource is most available.