DEVELOPER TOOLS

When the POPS system for requesting time on the National Science Foundations' high-performance computing resources opened for submissions to its spring round of allocations, those who visited saw for the first time all of NCSA's NSF-funded systems available as TeraGrid resources. Adding NCSA's Tungsten, Radium, and Copper systems will bring the TeraGrid's total computational performance to a peak of about 90 trillion calculations per second. NCSA expects to allocate approximately 400 million NUs at the upcoming allocations review meeting in March 2006. This change will give anyone who is awarded an allocation on NCSA's systems the ability to easily obtain "roaming" allocations supported on all TeraGrid systems. That means they will be able to make use of their allocation on other systems at NCSA and around the country with an eye toward the availability of systems at opportune times, exploring their code's performance by changing to a different architecture, or expanding their science via grid workflows. By moving all its systems to the TeraGrid, NCSA also gives its users access to the TeraGrid's 40 gigabit per second network—the fastest computational science network in the world—to move data among TeraGrid resources. For TeraGrid users, NCSA's expanded contribution increases both the capacity and the capability of the TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure. Since the TeraGrid came online in October 2004, NCSA has delivered 344 million normalized units of computing power to the TeraGrid research community—more than half the TeraGrid's total. Between October 2004 and November 2005, TeraGrid's resource providers have delivered more than 676 million NUs. Users will also get access to more than one petabyte of "spinning disk"—readily accessible disk storage that can be accessed during a calculation—and more than five petabytes of archival storage at NCSA. TeraGrid users come from a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines, including geoscience, nanoscience, astronomy, and environmental engineering. In total, the TeraGrid is home to more than 300 distinct, active scientific projects.