SCI: TeraGrid Resource Partners

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The Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) is the next stage in the evolution of NSF large-scale cyberinfrastructure for enabling high-end computational research. The ETF enables researchers to address the most challenging computational problems by utilizing the integrated resources, data collections, instruments and visualization capabilities of nine resource partners. On October 1, 2004, the ETF concluded a three-year construction effort to create this distributed environment called the TeraGrid (TG) and we are now entering the production operations phase.The TeraGrid resource partners include: the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT-Austin, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, Indiana University, Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.A separate proposal was submitted to NSF on October 19, 2004 for the TeraGrid Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG). Under the direction of Charlie Catlett at UC/ANL, in general, the GIG will be responsible for coordination of development activities for the TeraGrid with subcontracts to the partner sites. The resource partners (RP) will each have independent cooperative agreements with NSF, but will work closely with the GIG to implement the vision of the TeraGrid.This proposal outlines the plan at SDSC to participate as a resource partner in the TeraGrid team to provide the expanding user community with ongoing access to this computational science facility. This proposal covers the period November 1, 2004 through October 31, 2009.SDSC will bring a powerful set of compute and storage resources to the TeraGrid and will focus on the data-intensive computing needs of TeraGrid scientists. SDSC's current TeraGrid resources are summarized with those of other RP sites and include a 3.1 Tflop IA- 64 system, a 1.1 Tflop Power4 system (part of the larger DataStar system), and an experimental 1.3 Tflop IA-64 system. Every SDSC compute node can access data at 200 MBps or more and can use its DB2 client to address structured databases via leading edge servers. The central Storage Area Network (SAN) has over 0.5 PB of disk and a 6 PB archival tape capacity available to all nodes and servers, and SDSC plans to export its capabilities across the TeraGrid Wide Area Network (WAN) [16, 17] using a true global file system. SDSC's 540 TB SAN of online disk will make possible new modes of handling data across the TeraGrid. Generating data locally, competing with others for disk space and saving results to archival storage through an often slow interface all serve as restrictions to scientists. The ability to write directly to a very large file system, where post-processing can occur and where results are automatically archived, is a significant improvement in capability for scientists. For example, the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) [6] has performed an earthquake simulation analyzing the resulting damage from a potential earthquake in the Southern California region.