NSF provides $53 Million for a distributed terascale Grid facilityChampaign 09 August 2001 The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $53 million to four U.S. research institutions to build and deploy a distributed terascale facility (DTF). The DTF will be the largest, most comprehensive infrastructure ever deployed for scientific research--with more than 13.6 Tflop/s of computing power as well as facilities capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes (trillions of bytes) of data.
The four research institutions in the DTF project are the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California at San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Each institution plays a key role in the NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, which is building the 21st century's information infrastructure. NCSA leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), and SDSC leads the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). Argonne is a major Alliance partner, and Caltech is a key NPACI partner. The partnership expects to work primarily with IBM, Intel Corporation, and Qwest Communications to build the facility, along with Myricom, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle Corporation.
Linux clusters purchased through the DTF award and distributed across the four DTF sites will total 11.6 teraflops of computing power. In addition, two teraflop Linux cluster systems already in use at NCSA will be integrated into the DTF system, creating the 13.6-teraflop system--the most powerful distributed computing system ever. Besides offering the world's fastest unclassified supercomputers, the DTF's hardware and software will include ultra high-speed networks, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing. All of these components will be tightly integrated into an information infrastructure dubbed the "TeraGrid." Scientists and industry researchers across the country will be able to tap this infrastructure to solve scientific problems.
The DTF will consist primarily of clustered IBM servers based on Intel Itanium? family processors interconnected with Myricom's Myrinet. It will build upon two existing clusters of 1,300-plus Itanium and IA-32 processors already deployed at NCSA. The clusters will operate as a single distributed facility, linked via a dedicated optical network that will initially operate at 40 gigabits per second and later be upgraded to 50-80 gigabits per second. This DTF network, developed in partnership with Qwest, will transport data 16 times faster than the fastest research networks now in operation. It will connect to Abilene, the high-performance network that links more than 180 research institutions across the country; STAR TAP, an interconnect point in Chicago that provides access to and from international research networks; and CENIC's CalREN-2, an advanced high-speed network that connects institutions in California. In Illinois, the I-WIRE optical network will provide the DTF with network capacity and will give Argonne and NCSA additional bandwidth for related network research initiatives.
"Breakthrough discoveries in fields from biology and genomics to astronomy depend critically on computational and data management infrastructure as a first-class scientific tool," said Fran Berman, director of NPACI and SDSC and a principal investigator of the DTF award. "The TeraGrid recognizes the increasing importance of data-oriented computing and connection of data archives, remote instruments, computational sites, and visualization over high-speed networks. The TeraGrid will be a far more powerful and flexible scientific tool than any single supercomputing system."
"The investment we have made in VentureTECH has helped secure this award and once again shows our ability to leverage substantial new resources for Illinois," said Governor George H. Ryan. "I am proud to acknowledge the National Science Foundation's recognition of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Argonne National Lab's leadership in the Distributed Terascale Facility initiative," said Ryan.
Each of the four DTF sites will play a unique role in the project.
Building and deploying the DTF will take place over three years.
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