The TeraGrid Expands

The TeraGrid is an advanced computing infrastructure aimed at open scientific research that will soon receive a powerful 2048-processor BlueGene/L system at the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR for short).

The IBM built supercomputer, codenamed Frost, requires only a fraction of the power and space needed by other computing systems thanks to its highly integrated architecture. With this machine the TeraGrid's computing capacity will increase to more than 250 teraflops, while its data storage capabilities will receive an additional boost of "30 petabytes of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks", according to the NCAR press release concerning this event.

NCAR announced that the BlueGene/L system will be available up to 4.5 million processor-hours annually to researchers. "We are excited to be at a point where all our hard work and preparation pays off, and to provide the TeraGrid community with access to this valuable collaborative resource," says Richard Loft, NCAR TeraGrid principal investigator, after the engineers finished the integration of the news computing system into the existing TeraGrid infrastructure. Apart from the integration of the Frost supercompurter into the TeraGrid, NCAR is also testing a number of experimental technologies, systems and services on the TeraGrid infrastructure. They include wider area versions of the parallel file systems designed by IBM as the Cluster File Systems and remote data management capabilities developed as an open source applications by a number of universities.

NCAR's Frost supercomputer will be the second BlueGene/L system on the TeraGrid that is integrated into the open source research project, joining the already working machine from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which has 6144 processors. The TeraGrid is sponsorized by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure and it is intended as an infrastructure for high performance computing composed of people, hardware resources and services that will help scientific research and discoveries in the United States. "Through coordinated policy, grid software, and high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of high-capability computational, data-management and visualization resources to make research more productive. With Science Gateway collaborations and education programs, the TeraGrid also connects and broadens scientific communities".