SYSTEMS

Two committees charged with allocating access to the high-performance computing systems supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded 87.4 million service units (SUs) on TeraGrid systems. Each SU represents one processor-hour that a researcher can use on one of the TeraGrid's powerful compute systems (Web site) which combined offer more than 300 teraflops. Scientists and engineers throughout the U.S. apply for allocations in order to conduct research that would not be possible without the high-performance systems supported by NSF. The Large Resource Allocation Committee (LRAC) and the Medium Resource Allocation Committee (MRAC) review these proposals and provide millions of hours of compute time to accelerate research in astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, and other disciplines. The MRAC considers requests of 30,001 to 500,000 services units four times a year, while the LRAC considers requests for more than 500,000 service units twice each year. Requests for up to 30,000 service units are considered, usually within two to three weeks, by the Development Allocations Committee (DAC). At their most recent meetings, the LRAC awarded almost 72.9 million SUs to 54 proposals and the MRAC granted 13.2 million SUs to 56 projects. The five largest awards went to: * Thomas Jordan, Southern California Earthquake Center, 15.2 million SUs for earthquake modeling and prediction * Colin Morningstar, Carnegie Mellon University, 4 million SUs for quantum chromodynamics * Juri Toomre, JILA/University of Colorado, 3.9 million SUs for solar convection * Michael Deem, Rice University, 3.7 million SUs to develop a database of hypothetical zeolite structures * Carlos Simmerling, SUNY Stony Brook, 3 million SUs for simulation of biomolecular structure and dynamics Compute time was also awarded to six of the TeraGrid's http://www.teragrid.org/programs/sci_gateways/ Science Gateway projects. Gateways open the TeraGrid to broad communities of users, giving them access to high-end resources through a community-designed interface. The Gateways receiving allocations were: * COSIER/CSE-Online http://cse-online.net/ * GISolve https://grow-gisolve.its.uiowa.edu/gridsphere/gridsphere * GridChem http://www.gridchem.org/ * nanoHub http://cse-online.net/ * Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery https://portal.leadproject.org/gridsphere/gridsphere * National Virtual Observatory http://www.us-vo.org/nesssi/ Any researcher or educator at a U.S. academic or non-profit research institution is eligible to apply for a TeraGrid allocation. There is no cost to the principal investigator for allocations of any size. For details, see http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/access/accounts.php.