GOVERNMENT

Lamar University’s faculty will soon have access to many of the world’s fastest supercomputers to conduct research thanks to TeraGrid, an open scientific infrastructure combining 11 university and governmental sites across the nation to create an integrated computational resource.

By joining TeraGrid, LU faculty can access the capabilities of many of the world’s fastest computers. The TeraGrid brings together resources from across the country — high-capability computers, high-speed networks and tools for data-management and visualization — to help U.S. scientists and engineers tackle bigger problems, achieve new breakthroughs and make their research more productive.

“Joining the TeraGrid not only adds access to tremendous computing power for research and discovery, it also enhances Lamar’s faculty links to the greater scientific community and creates unbounded opportunities for collaboration,” said Stephen Doblin, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

Supercomputing is shaping science. The ability to map the genome, to create increasinglly complex and accurate weather models, model aerospace applications and explore nanotechnology are all benefiting from the latest supercomputers and from load-sharing networks like TeraGrid.

Current research programs at Lamar in engineering and other disciplines already demand significant computing power.  Tapping into TeraGrid will boost these programs and may attract additional research, help Lamar recruit talented faculty and draw funding to the university, Doblin said.

TeraGrid is coordinated through the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the resource provider sites at Indiana University, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center and University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory.

These institutions also provide services like new software, support for users, and staff who keep the TeraGrid operating smoothly.

“This capability will help Lamar move forward and be a real player in cutting edge research,” said Michael Entner, director of infrastructure and security. “It is extremely important to our future research.”

Michael Dobe, the university’s associate vice president for information systems, and Larry Osborne, chair of the computer science department, will team up to help the campus realize the capabilities of TeraGrid.

Tapping into TeraGrid requires extremely fast Internet connectivity. Lamar’s 5-megabit Internet 2 connection will soon be a 35-megabit connection. The university will continue upgrades to facilitate the full 400-megabit connection in the future.

Lamar’s high-speed connections are made possible by its participation in the Lone Star Education and Research Network (LEARN). Founded in 2001, LEARN is a joint effort of 34 Texas institutions of higher learning to provide high-speed connectivity via an optical fiber network. LEARN provides Lamar University with the high bandwidth needed for connection to high capacity computing.

Currently, TeraGrid offers more than a petaflop of computing capability — comparable to the processing power of the world’s fastest super computer. A petaflop is 1015 floating-point operations per second, a measure of a computer’s performance., or  10,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second.

The 32nd edition of TOP500, a benchmark of the world’s fastest computers, shows IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the top spot at 1.105 petaflops, narrowly edging out Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XT5 Jaguar at 1.059 petaflops.

Currently, TeraGrid resources also include more than 30 petabytes of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Researchers can also access more than 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyber infrastructure for open scientific research.