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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / OCTOBER 6, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 40
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Special Features:
NSF ANNOUNCES AWARDS TO EXTEND
REACH OF TERASCALE FACILITY
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $10 million in awards to
Indiana and Purdue universities, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and The
University of Texas to enhance the capabilities of NSF's Extensible Terascale
Facility (ETF) with not only computing resources, but also scientific
instruments and data collections. Through the new awards, the ETF will put
neutron-scattering instruments and other unique resources online for the
nation's research and education community.
The four awardees will join the five current partners in the ETF, a
multi-year
effort to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, distributed
computational infrastructure for general scientific research. The new awards
fund the high-speed network connections needed to share resources across the
ETF infrastructure, commonly known as the TeraGrid.
"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 ETF
demonstrate the great promise that a distributed cyberinfrastructure has to
revolutionize science and engineering research and education in the 21st
century."
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 ETF network hub to be
located 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. As one of the laboratories of
the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), ORNL is connecting its High Flux Isotope
Reactor and Spallation Neutron Source instruments, as well as ORNL's Center
for Computational Sciences that houses leading edge high-end computing and
storage resources, to the ETF, so that these rare and expensive resources may
be widely 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 ETF 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 data sets deriving 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 ETF 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 ETF in August 2001 with $45 million in funding to four
sites:
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the
University of California, San Diego; Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne,
IL; and the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute
of Technology in Pasadena. In October 2002, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center joined the ETF partnership when NSF announced $35 million in
supplementary funding.
The initial ETF 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.
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