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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
FIRST PHASE OF TeraGrid GOES INTO
PRODUCTION
The first computing systems of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid
project are in production mode, making 4.5 teraflops of distributed computing
power available to scientists across the country who are conducting research
in a wide range of disciplines, from astrophysics to environmental
science.
The TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to build and deploy the world's
largest,
most comprehensive distributed infrastructure for open scientific research.
The TeraGrid also offers storage, visualization, database, and data collection
capabilities. Hardware at multiple sites across the country is networked
through a 40-gigabit per second backplanethe fastest research network on the
planet.
The systems currently in production represent the first of two deployments,
with the completed TeraGrid scheduled to provide over 20 teraflops of
capability. The phase two hardware, which will add more than 11 teraflops of
capacity, was installed in December 2003 and is scheduled to be available to
the research community this spring.
"We are pleased to see scientific research being conducted on the initial
production TeraGrid system," said Peter Freeman, head of NSF's Computer and
Information Sciences and Engineering directorate. "Leading-edge supercomputing
capabilities are essential to the emerging cyberinfrastructure, and the
TeraGrid represents NSF's commitment to providing high-end, innovative
resources."
The TeraGrid sites are: Argonne National Laboratory; the Center for
Advanced
Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology; Indiana
University; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center (PSC); Purdue University; the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC) at the University of California-San Diego; and the Texas
Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas.
"This is an exciting milestone for scientific computing -- the TeraGrid is
a
new concept and there has never been a distributed computing system of its
size and scope," said NCSA interim director Rob Pennington, the TeraGrid site
lead for NCSA. "In addition to its immediate value in enabling new science,
the TeraGrid project is a tool for the development of a national
cyberinfrastructure, and the cooperative relationships forged through this
effort provide a framework for future innovation and collaboration."
"The TeraGrid partners have worked extremely hard during the two-year
construction phase of this project and are delighted that this initial phase
of what will be an unprecedented level of computing and data resources is now
online for the nation's researchers to use," said Fran Berman, SDSC director
and co-principal investigator of the TeraGrid project. "The TeraGrid is one of
the foundations of cyberinfrastructure that will provide even more computing
resources later this year."
The computing systems that entered production this month consist of more
than
800 Itanium-family IBM processors running Linux. NCSA maintains a 2.7-teraflop
cluster, which was installed in spring 2003, and SDSC has a 1.3-teraflop
cluster. The 6-teraflop, 3,000-processor HP AlphaServerSC Terascale Computing
System (TCS) at PSC is also a component of the TeraGrid infrastructure.
"The launch of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project provides
scientists and researchers across the nation with access to unprecedented
computational power," said David Turek, vice president of Deep Computing with
IBM. "Working with the NSF, IBM is committed to the continued development of
breakthrough Grid technologies that benefit our scientific/technical and
commercial customers."
Allocations for use of the TeraGrid were awarded by the NSF's Partnerships
for
Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) last October. Among the first
wave of researchers to use the TeraGrid are scientists studying the evolution
of the universe and the cleanup of contaminated groundwater, simulating
seismic events, and analyzing biomolecular dynamics.
1. SDSC computational astrophysicist Robert Harkness has adapted an
astrophysical simulation program called Enzo to run on the TeraGrid. Harkness
is a member of SDSC's Strategic Applications Collaborations team, which works
closely with scientific investigators to tune their programs to take maximum
advantage of the power of supercomputers, and has collaborated closely with
the TeraGrid effort for the past year.
Enzo was created by Michael Norman, a physics professor at the Center for
Astrophysics and Space Science (CASS) at the University of California, San
Diego (UCSD), with assistance from colleagues at CASS, SDSC and other
institutions. Enzo recently created the world's largest and most complex
scientific simulation of the evolution of the universe, tracking the formation
of enormous structures of galaxies and gas clouds during the billions of years
following the Big Bang.
2. TeraGyroid is an international TeraGrid project that employs
computational
steering and uses distributed computing, storage, and visualization facilities
at PSC, NCSA, SDSC, and Argonne (along with resources at Daresbury Lab and
Manchester, UK) to simulate complex materials shapes, known as gyroids, with
properties in between solid and liquid. Gyroids have important applications in
controlled drug release and biosensors. This project won the HPC Challenge for
"Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application" at SC 2003 in Phoenix. Using the
TCS at PSC via the TeraGrid, this project completed the largest simulation of
its kind (the lattice-Boltzmann model) to date.
3. Barbara Minsker, a research scientist at NCSA, began conducting
groundwater
remediation research on the TeraGrid during its friendly-user phase and is
continuing her work now that the system has moved into full production. Her
research -- which is designed to help government agencies find the most
effective and least costly methods to clean up polluted sites -- employs
computationally intensive genetic algorithms.
"With the TeraGrid, we can solve a much bigger problem," Minsker said. "It
enables us to look at real-world problems that no one has been able to solve
before."
To learn more about the TeraGrid, go to www.teragrid.org.
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