Entropia to donate 200 million CPU hours of computing time to US academicsDallas 10 Nov 2000 At the Supercomputing2000 conference this week in Dallas, Texas, Entropia CTO Andrew Chien announced this morning that his company has signed agreements with both the National Computational Science Alliance ("Alliance") and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). As part of the agreements, Entropia, an Internet and enterprise computing services company, will donate an unprecedented 200 million CPU hours to the PACI program, creating the largest computing platform ever offered to its national academic user community. The Alliance and NPACI are both part of the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure Program.
This partnership will serve one of the largest communities of
nationally distinguished computer and computational scientists and
researchers. Entropia's donated resources are comparable to 10 years
of output from the largest computational systems currently available
to academia. These 200 million CPU hours will be utilized by projects
jointly selected by both Entropia and the PACI Program. Current
scientific research projects supported by the PACI program include
bioinformatics, protein folding, telescience, multi-physics
simulations and scalable visualization rendering.
Entropia produces Entropia 2000, software that snaps into any PC
and connects it to a global Entropia computing grid of more than
100,000 PCs in more than 80 countries. The software allows researchers
in business and academia to tackle complex computing tasks by taking
advantage of idle PC resources across the world.
Through this new collaboration, Entropia will deploy its Node
Server at the leading-edge sites of the Alliance, the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana-Champaign, Ill. and
of the NPACI, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in San Diego,
Calif. This deployment will also mean access to Entropia's global
network of PCs.
"We will work with Entropia to develop projects that can utilize
this important resource," said Dan Reed, director of the Alliance and
NCSA. "We will also work with their team so that more groundbreaking
scientific applications will run in the Entropia environment, a
platform with clear and increasing importance for high performance
computing."
"NPACI is pleased to partner with Entropia to provide the
computational science community with access to this Internet computing
capability, which will work extremely well for certain classes of
problems," said Sid Karin, director of NPACI and SDSC. "In addition to
tightly coupled systems, I expect distributed megacomputers to be part
of our arsenal to support the spectrum of scientific disciplines."
Both NCSA and SDSC have been leaders in providing national access
to innovative high performance computing architectures for 15 years.
Entropia's donation extends this tradition to a planetary
architecture.
"It's great to engage the scientists who are creating the new
computational applications, the foundation of the future of
computing," stated Andrew Chien CTO of Entropia. "Entropia recognizes
the responsibility in building the world's largest computing resource
and this donation demonstrates our commitment to supporting the
advancement of science and knowledge to the benefit of society at
large. We are proud to have been selected by these two leading
institutions to assist them in their computational research."
The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to
prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st
century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry
research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one
of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's
Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program,
and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports
the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure
(NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Ad Emmen |
 |