The TeraGrid: Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering

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The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with University of California, San Diego, is funded by a Cooperative Agreement from the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure in the amount of $26,450,500 to construct a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) that will span four institutions: 1) National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 2) San Diego Supercomputer Center, 3) Argonne National Laboratory and 4) California Institute of Technology. In partnership with IBM, Intel, Myrinet, Qwest, Oracle and SUN, they will construct a DTF based on multiple terascale Linux clusters, as well as large-scale storage archives and data management software. A 40 gigabit/second optical mesh will interconnect the DTF's components. The DTF hardware will be integrated, using Globus middleware and other Computational Grid technologies develop by the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), to create a system with an aggregate of 11.6 TF of computing capability and 525 TB of disk storage to support terascale computing (6.1 TF and 153 TB at NCSA), distributed data management (4.1 TF and 248 TB at SDSC), remote rendering and visualization (1 TF and 31 TB at Argonne), and data-intensive scientific application analysis (0.4 TF and 93 TB at Caltech). A unified Operations Center will coordinate management, user support, and access. The DTF TeraGrid will have broad impact on the computational science community and will ultimately benefit society as a whole. First, the TeraGrid will advance discovery and promote understanding by making available to academic researchers next generation information technologies that are an order of magnitude more capable than now generally available. Second, the TeraGrid will empower broad scientific and engineering communities through its focus on commodity clusters, common usage models and community codes. Third, experience gained through DTF operation, insights and software from the TeraGrid will be packaged in a series of software distributions for community use. This software packaging will extend TeraGrid technologies to the broader national community, including Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) and EPSCoR Institutions.