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TEXAS TO BUILD NETWORK, GRID FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION

Texas Governor Rick Perry and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst have just announced the approval of $9.8 million in funding to build the high-speed Lonestar Education And Research Network (LEARN) for Texas higher education institutions, and to construct the Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE) to enable these institutions to access and share resources, collaborate on research, and facilitate online teaching and remote learning.

The LEARN consortium includes more than 30 universities and medical research institutions in Texas. LEARN will link these universities at much higher speeds than current networks, permitting researchers to share very large data sets and to collaborate in real time.

TIGRE will use Grid computing software technologies to connect the Texas institutions on LEARN. TIGRE will enable each institution to share its own resources-computing, visualization and storage systems, plus data collections and databases, large-scale scientific instruments and sensor networks-over LEARN. TIGRE access to the state's rich set of distributed resources will enable Texas researchers, educators, and industrial partners to address the most challenging and important problems in areas such as biomedical research, environmental modeling, petroleum engineering and computer science.

TIGRE will be constructed over two years by the five founding institutions in the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) consortium: Rice University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, the University of Houston and The University of Texas.

"Through LEARN and TIGRE, Texas researchers will have access to the most powerful computing resources and capabilities in Texas and the U.S., and will be poised to make discoveries on the world's most challenging research issues," said Jay Boisseau, director of UT Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and the current director of HiPCAT.

Many other states, including California, North Carolina and Louisiana, have invested in or announced high-bandwidth networks and Grid deployment projects to enable their universities to conduct collaborative research and partner with industry in such research. The investments in LEARN and TIGRE will help Texas universities and industrial partners work together as well, thus magnifying their capabilities and the impact of their collective research expertise.

"This is an exciting opportunity for Texas because our great universities, medical research centers, and leading companies have a new platform for collaborating on world-class research," said Dan Updegrove, vice president for information technology at The University of Texas and chairman of the board of LEARN. "It is appropriate that TIGRE and LEARN receive state support simultaneously, since our projects are so complementary: LEARN will provide the transport for development and deployment of TIGRE, which in turn will accelerate utilization of LEARN's networking resources. We salute state leaders for understanding that advanced research collaboration requires not only high-bandwidth networks and high performance computing resources, but also the sophisticated Grid software to be developed by TIGRE."

Furthermore, with the imminent connection of UT Austin into the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid, LEARN and TIGRE will shortly enable high-bandwidth connectivity directly into the most powerful computing Grid in the United States. Boisseau, who is also TeraGrid principal investigator at the University, said, "Using Grid software developed for the TeraGrid, under the NSF National Middleware Initiative, and by leading Grid computing researchers in HiPCAT, TIGRE will become a showcase Grid for higher education."

About LEARN

The Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) is a cooperative effort of 31 institutions and organizations of higher education in Texas to provide high-speed connectivity among their institutions as well as to research networks around the world in support of the higher education research, teaching, health care and public service missions. Learn more at www.tx-learn.net.

About HiPCAT

High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) is a consortium of Texas institutions that use advanced computational technologies to enhance research, development, and educational activities across the state of Texas. For further information, please visit www.hipcat.net.