OIL & GAS

The TeraGrid partnership, a multi-year effort to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, distributed computational infrastructure for general scientific research, expanded today as the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $10 million in awards to Indiana and Purdue universities, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Texas. These institutions will add a variety of computing resources, scientific instruments and data collections to the TeraGrid resources offered by the five current partner sites, including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "These new awardees bring a rich mixture of shared computational resources, analytic tools and data assets that enable research and education at a scope and scale that was previously impossible," said Deborah Crawford, deputy assistant director of NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. "The resources and expertise these partners bring to the TeraGrid demonstrate the great promise that a distributed cyberinfrastructure has to revolutionize science and engineering research and education in the 21st century." The awards fund the high-speed network connections needed to share resources across the TeraGrid. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) received $3.9 million to establish a 10-gigabit-per-second network connection that will integrate the neutron-scattering instruments at ORNL through a new network hub in Atlanta. Scientific disciplines ranging from biology and chemistry to earth sciences and semiconductor manufacturing use neutron scattering to probe the structure and dynamics of materials. ORNL—one of the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)—is connecting its High Flux Isotope Reactor and Spallation Neutron Source instruments, as well as the high-end computing and storage resources of its Center for Computational Sciences, to the TeraGrid so that these rare and expensive resources may be used throughout the scientific community. "The close partnership between NSF and DOE continues to generate tremendous value for the U.S. science and engineering research and education enterprise," Crawford said. ORNL is collaborating with partners at Duke University, Florida State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Indiana University and Purdue University were together awarded $3 million to build a 20-gigabit-per-second connection from those institutions through Indianapolis to the existing TeraGrid hub in Chicago. Indiana and Purdue will contribute up to 6.26 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of computing capability; up to 400 terabytes of data storage capacity; visualization resources; specialized instrumentation, including the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory, and a number of life science datasets derived from Indiana University's Indiana Genomics Initiative. At the University of Texas, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) was awarded $3.2 million to establish a 10-gigabit-per-second network connection from Austin, Texas, to the new TeraGrid hub in Atlanta. TACC is contributing access to high-end computers capable of 6.2 teraflops, its new terascale visualization system, the center's 2.8-petabyte mass storage system, and geoscience data collections. These collections include high-resolution digital terrain data, worldwide hydrological data, global gravity data, and high-resolution X-ray computed tomography data, which are invaluable research tools for scientists in environmental, geological, climate and biological research programs. NSF launched the TeraGrid project in August 2001 with $45 million in funding to four sites: NCSA; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego; Argonne National Laboratory; and the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In October 2002, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center joined the TeraGrid partnership when NSF announced $35 million in supplementary funding. The initial partners and awards are providing 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at five sites, facilities for managing and storing nearly 1 petabyte of disk-accessible data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing. These components will be tightly integrated and connected through a network backbone that will operate at 40 gigabits per second—the fastest research network on the planet. See http://www.teragrid.org/ for more information.