APPLICATIONS

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and its TeraGrid project partners will receive about $35 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to expand the project, NCSA Director Dan Reed announced. TeraGrid is a multi-year, NSF-funded effort to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. Today's Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) award expands the $53 million TeraGrid project, announced in August 2001, to five sites: NCSA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego; Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago; the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology; and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. "This expansion of the TeraGrid will provide computing power to scientists that is orders of magnitude beyond anything we've ever seen before," said Reed, chief architect for the TeraGrid project. "In addition, it will provide the best high-resolution visualization environments, more storage capacity than ever before possible, and access to grid computing toolkits and grid-enabled applications. The impact on scientific discovery will be significant. At this point, we can't even begin to imagine the discoveries that the TeraGrid will make possible." NCSA, SDSC, Argonne, and CACR were already part of the TeraGrid project. PSC previously received an NSF award to build a terascale computing system called TCS-1. The ETF award integrates these efforts and their computing environments to provide the national research community with more than 20 teraflops of computing power distributed among the five sites and nearly 1 petabyte (1 quadrillion bytes) of storage capacity. The award also ensures that additional sites will be able to connect to the TeraGrid. The five sites will be linked by the world's fastest optical research network, which will operate at 40 gigabits per second, built in partnership with Qwest Communications and designed to accommodate additional connections. The NSF awards will go to NCSA, SDSC, and PSC. Argonne and CACR will receive their funding through the three awardees. Final amounts will be determined through negotiation between the NSF and the awardees. For more information about NCSA and TeraGrid, see www.ncsa.uiuc.edu.