ACADEMIA

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $10 million to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin over the next five years to expand the TeraGrid-a national-scale initiative and system of interconnected, leadership-class computers that scientists and engineers use to solve some of their most challenging problems. "TACC is proud to represent The University of Texas at Austin in working with some of the nation's leading institutions to develop, operate and evolve the TeraGrid," says Dr. Jay Boisseau, TACC director and the principal investigator for the university on the project. What is TeraGrid? TeraGrid-built over the past four years-is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. Only the U.S. Department of Energy's weapons laboratories have larger systems, which are dedicated to classified research. The TeraGrid team expects this comprehensive cyberinfrastructure to affect virtually every scientific discipline that requires intensive computing capabilities, from disease diagnosis and weather forecasting to the study of drug interactions with cancer cells and aircraft design simulation. "TeraGrid integrates some of the nation's most powerful resources to provide high-capability production services to the scientific community," says Charlie Catlett of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, director of the TeraGrid initiative and former chair of the Global Grid Forum. "The purpose of this five-year award is to take the initial TeraGrid system and deepen and evolve its capabilities while continuing to provide a persistent national infrastructure." TACC's Involvement "We're excited to contribute to the development of the most powerful cyberinfrastructure project in the world today," Boisseau continues. "TACC is contributing terascale resources and advanced computing technologies based on our deep expertise in user portals, grid scheduling/workflow software, data collections and scientific visualization. These technologies will contribute to the success of the TeraGrid as a powerful tool for knowledge discovery by greatly enhancing its capabilities and simplifying its usage." For example, Maverick is the result of a joint project between TACC and Sun Microsystems, developed specifically for large-scale problems on the TeraGrid. Maverick is a 128-processor Sun E25K terascale visualization machine with 512 gigabytes of shared memory, backed by a 50 terabyte Sun storage area network. Maverick blends high-performance computing capabilities, large-scale shared memory, and commodity graphics technologies to provide grid-enabled, multi-user remote and collaborative visualization capabilities. Kelly Gaither, TACC's associate director of research and development, says: "We're happy to provide this unique blend of leading-edge and commodity technologies that will allow researchers to interactively nvestigate massive datasets, decreasing the time to scientific insight." TACC contributions to the TeraGrid include: * Lonestar, the 1024-processor Cray/Dell Xeon-based Linux cluster; * Maverick, the 128-processor Sun E25K terascale visualization machine with 512 gigabytes of shared memory for a total of 6.75 teraflops of computing/visualization capacity; * Hosting of four major databases contributed by several University of Texas at Austin research centers-three geosciences databases and one bioinformatics database derived from computed tomography (CT) images; * Software technologies for remote and collaborative visualization; * Software technologies (GridShell) for grid scheduling, data, and workflows; * Grid-enabled user portal using TACC's GridPort software. TACC is one of eight supercomputing centers across the nation that together provide the TeraGrid's computational, storage, software, and instrument and visualization resources, along with user support and related services. The other partner sites, also called Resource Providers (RPs), are: The University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory; Indiana University; National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Purdue University; and San Diego Supercomputer Center. Future Growth of the TeraGrid "This NSF grant is about enabling science by advancing and evolving the TeraGrid system, which at the moment has about a thousand users," Catlett continues. "We'll grow that number to what we hope will be in the 7,000 to 10,000 range." Many of these new users will join TeraGrid through 10 science gateways, with funding for their integration coming from the NSF grant. These gateways will allow more researchers and educators access to the TeraGrid in ways tailored to their special needs, through their own desktop computers or through advanced Web portals. Such access will enable researchers to analyze terabytes-trillions of bytes-of data collected by scientific instruments, telescopes, satellites and remote sensors. TeraGrid will allow researchers to manipulate enormous data sets in novel ways to gain new insights into research questions and societal problems. One such example enabled by TACC is the Flood Modeling Science Gateway. It will allow hydrologists to tap TeraGrid data collections of LiDAR land elevations and NEXRAD precipitation data and to investigate the effects of storm events using models developed by the UT Center for Research in Water Resources. The gateway presents an opportunity to scale up an application that has up to this time run exclusively on small-scale workstations and to simulate much greater special and temporal extents at considerably higher resolutions. "Ultimately, the TeraGrid is defining a new vision of the potential offered by integrating computing resources, visualization systems, data collections and instruments into cyberinfrastructure that enhances the capabilities of researchers," Boisseau concludes. "Scientists will tackle new challenges on the TeraGrid by developing applications that would have been impossible before now. TeraGrid will serve as an example of what is possible, and TACC is playing a leading role in this transformation." Scale Up Your Research with a Development Allocation Researchers may request access to the TeraGrid by submitting proposals for a Development Allocation (DAC) start-up account-up to 30,000 service units of "roaming" allocation to use on any TeraGrid resource. 1. Go to: www.teragrid.org Web site. Click on "New Allocations" and "More on DAC Accounts." 2. Submit an abstract, as instructed, describing your science, applications you are using, and which TeraGrid resources you want to explore. 3. If you have questions, please send an email to: help@teragrid.org. Or, please call Chris Hempel, TeraGrid Site Lead for TACC, at: 512-475-9479.