The Open Science Grid (OSG) Generic Information Provider (OSG-GIP) has been developed by the GROW (Grid Research and educatiOn group @ IoWa) to enable LCG-OSG interoperability, OSG resource selection service, GridCat, etc. The GIP is a grid information service that aggregates static and dynamic resource information for use with LDAP-based information systems. The GIP produces information based on the GLUE Schema.
The OSG-GIP adopts the design of the LCG GIP that mainly consists of the following four components:

1. The core GIP components collect and format information to be consumed by GRIS;
2. Configuration files include static information about local computing or storage resources;
3. Dynamic plugins provide up-to-date information about resource usage; and
4. Provider scripts allow flexible addition of new dynamic information sources.

The 2, 3, and 4 components above need to be specific to the OSG. The OSG-GIP focuses on the following three aspects of development work:

1. Dynamic plugins and provider scripts created to capture OSG resource status and usage.
2. Automatic configuration: A main challenge with GIP use is that it is difficult to configure GIP properly without fully understanding GLUE Schema. This challenge poses a daunting task for grid administrators to get GIP working correctly through manual configuration processes. To address the challenge, we have created a configuration tool that automatically gets the OSG-GIP configured to a working state out-of-box with minimal administrator intervention by leveraging the existing OSG configuration information (e.g., osg-attributes.conf). Currently OSG-GIP supports PBS condor, LSF and SGE batch systems while being compliant with the GLUE Schema 1.2.
3. Validation service: The OSG-GIP validation service infrequently pulls information (using LDAP search) directly from individual OSG systems to perform sanity checks on their GIP information. The systems on both OSG ITB and production GridCat are being validated by this service. The service has been implemented to provide a user-friendly interface.

Both the automatic configuration tool and validation service are still under active development. However, we plan to maintain consistent user interfaces as well as backward compatibility.