Teragrid’s First Targets Include Galaxy Formation and Pollution Cleanup
The first computing resources of the National Science Foundations (NSF) TeraGrid became fully available for scientific use in January, and some of the first applications will be tracking the formation of galaxies in the early universe and finding the most efficient and least expensive ways to clean up groundwater pollution.
Other early TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org) users will study seismic events and analyze biomolecular dynamics on the Linux clusters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). The two clusters together offer 4.5 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of computing power and access to more than 250 terabytes of disk storage. Allocations for use of these machines were awarded by the NSFs Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) last October.
“We are pleased to see scientific research being conducted on the first production TeraGrid clusters,” said Peter Freeman, head of NSFs Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering directorate. “Leading-edge supercomputing capabilities are essential to the emerging cyberinfrastructure, and the TeraGrid represents NSFs commitment to providing high-end, innovative resources.”
NSFs TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to deploy the worlds largest, most comprehensive distributed infrastructure of computation, information and instrumentation resources for scientific research. Hardware at sites across the country is connected by a 40-gigabit per second backplane—the fastest research network on the planet.
The TeraGrid sites include NCSA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; SDSC at the University of California, San Diego; the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at Caltech; Argonne National Laboratory; and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). In 2003, NSF made awards to extend the TeraGrid partnership to Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
In December, NCSA and SDSC installed Linux clusters that will provide an additional 11 teraflops of computing power. The expanded clusters will enter production by June 2004, bringing the combined power of the completed TeraGrid systems to 20 teraflops, including the 6-teraflops, 3,000-processor Terascale Computing System at PSC.
Media Contact
All latest news from the category: Information Technology
Here you can find a summary of innovations in the fields of information and data processing and up-to-date developments on IT equipment and hardware.
This area covers topics such as IT services, IT architectures, IT management and telecommunications.
Newest articles
Bringing bio-inspired robots to life
Nebraska researcher Eric Markvicka gets NSF CAREER Award to pursue manufacture of novel materials for soft robotics and stretchable electronics. Engineers are increasingly eager to develop robots that mimic the…
Bella moths use poison to attract mates
Scientists are closer to finding out how. Pyrrolizidine alkaloids are as bitter and toxic as they are hard to pronounce. They’re produced by several different types of plants and are…
AI tool creates ‘synthetic’ images of cells
…for enhanced microscopy analysis. Observing individual cells through microscopes can reveal a range of important cell biological phenomena that frequently play a role in human diseases, but the process of…