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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
TeraGrid BREAKS DOWN RESEARCH
BARRIERS
Although meteorology and biology do not have much in common, those who
study
them do. They, and scientists in general, need a lot of computing power to run
the applications that help them make breakthrough discoveries in their
respective fields.
Enter the TeraGrid.
The $50 million-plus effort announced by the National Science Foundation
three
years ago is creating the most powerful supercomputing facility for open
scientific research in the world.
It happens to be spread at sites across the country, linked together over a
high-speed network like a super Internet and functioning as if they were in
the same room.
Meanwhile, the TeraGrid is serving as a proving ground for Grid computing
technologies that may usher in an era when we all have access to data and
computing resources with the ubiquity of the electrical grid.
Scientists are using it in the form of the TeraGrid now. The system started
making 4.5 teraflops -– that is, 4.5 trillion calculations per second –- of
computing power available earlier this year.
Eventually, it will top 20 teraflops, up from the 13 originally planned,
with
nine sites involved, an increase from the original four.
The system will boast a petabyte of storage, equal to about 20 million
four-drawer file cabinets full of text, or 25,000 times the hard drive space
in your average PC.
The NCSA will house more than half the computing power and nearly a quarter
of
the storage space. Pennington said the center already is thinking about a
second addition to the Advanced Computation Building, where its supercomputers
are housed.
Those computers are, as is now the norm in supercomputing, rack after rack
of
more-or-less stock PCs linked together and working in concert, a practice
called "clustering."
The cluster for the TeraGrid contains more than 1,800 processors.
Scientists are using such power to improve the way severe weather is
modeled
and forecast.
One complaint about forecasting the weather is that while models are adept
at
forecasting on a global scale and within a 72-hour timeframe, it is very
approximate on a long-term, local scale.
TeraGrid provides the resources to work with more actual data in a more
timely
fashion.
TeraGrid also lets professors and scientists see molecules. The researchers
turn supercomputing power into a super microscope to look at the workings of
the human body's molecular machinery.
Obviously, they can't really "see" the action. But they can collect a
variety
of types of data about it and employ that in computer programs they've
developed to make pictures, even movies, of vital life processes such as water
molecules moving through cell walls.
Molecules may be small, but the number of vibrating atoms involved in
molecular processes is huge. Those vibrations are a key component that has to
be described properly, and that takes computing power.
All the better if they can turn the data stream on and off when they want,
like water from a faucet, and use the system to work interactively and in real
time with collaborators from all over, which the TeraGrid permits.
Other programs set to run on the system include the largest and most
complex
scientific simulation ever of the universe's evolution; and simulations to
study gyroids, materials with properties between solid and liquid that may
have important application in con trolled drug release and biosensors.
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