ACADEMIA

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $150 million award to operate and enhance the Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), also called TeraGrid. As a provider of significant TeraGrid resources and leadership, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will receive more than $14 million of this award. TeraGrid—built over the past four years—is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. Through high-performance network connections, TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities, making these resources accessible to researchers and educators across the country to accelerate advances in science and engineering. "The TeraGrid provides the scientific and engineering community with resources and capabilities that cannot be obtained at any of the sites alone," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "This will enable advances that could not otherwise be achieved." The new TeraGrid award includes $48 million to provide overall architecture, software integration, operations, and coordination of user support. The University of Chicago will lead this effort. An additional $100 million will provide for operation, management, and user support of TeraGrid resources at eight resource provider sites: Argonne National Laboratory / University of Chicago, Indiana University, NCSA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Texas Advanced Computing Center. NCSA offers TeraGrid users access to two high-performance computing systems, Mercury and Cobalt, that together provide over 16 teraflops of computing power. The center also contributes personnel to coordinate TeraGrid development and production services, to maintain and support the computational resources provided at NCSA, to assist users, and to enhance and advance the usability and utility of the TeraGrid. A special focus of NCSA's user support is partnership with TeraGrid scientific communities to architect high-end database solutions on NCSA's SGI database server, Charon, running Oracle 10g. NCSA technologies that have been incorporated into the TeraGrid include: the account management software AMIE; CluMon, a tool to facilitate cluster monitoring; MyProxy, which allows users to manage grid credentials; VMI, a middleware communication layer; uberFTP, an interactive gridFTP file transfer client; POPS, which enables proposal submission, review, and administration; and a ticketing system that provides a standard, easy-to-use method for reporting and responding to problems. For more information about TeraGrid, please see it Web site.