CLOUD

Scientists, engineers and other U.S. researchers can now apply by April 18 for allocations of high-performance computer time, storage and systems resources available through the TeraGrid, a partnership of 11 nationwide sites, sponsored by the Office of Cyberinfrastructure of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The deadline was extended from April 15. For this deadline, researchers may request mid-range allocations up to 500,000 service units (SU) of computer time; each SU represents one processor-hour a researcher can use on one of the TeraGrid’s powerful compute systems. Proposals for allocations greater than 500,000 SUs are due in July. With the recent additions of Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Infrastructure (NICS), Queen Bee at Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), Pople at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and Brutus at Purdue University, the total computer capacity of the TeraGrid now approaches one petaflop. The full list of 25 computing resources that are available is at: www.teragrid.org/userinfo/hardware/resources.php. TeraGrid also is making available large amounts of allocated tape and disk storage, as well as servers dedicated to the delivery of data resources via the web. These resources, available for use by individual researchers, research groups, or virtual organizations, include:

• Archival storage under the control of High Performance Storage System (HPSS), up to 100 TB of storage per allocation, for persistent, long-term storage, from Indiana University (IU) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
• Dedicated disk space, up to 25 TB per allocation, to support databases and data collections, from SDSC, IU, PSC, TACC and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
• Dedicated computational resources in support of Science Gateways or data resources (such as data resources that perform web-accessible or web-services accessible queries and computation) from National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and IU.

Researchers can also apply for other resources, such as animation rendering services from IU and Purdue University (the TeraDre resource). A detailed list of data-centric and research- and education- oriented TeraGrid resources available for allocation is described at www.teragrid.org/userinfo/data/index.php. Applications are subject to peer review, similar to other major projects funded by the NSF. However, TeraGrid does not re-review the scientific merit of researchers with federally funded research; the existence of federal funding is taken to confirm its scientific merit. For researchers who already are funded, projects are evaluated primarily on the appropriateness of the proposal for the cyberinfrastructure resources requested. Allocations approved for this cycle will begin July 1. Proposals for large allocations are reviewed twice a year, with the next deadline for large allocations in July. Proposals for medium requests are reviewed four times a year – with proposals due in January, April, July, and October. For additional information, see the allocations section of the TeraGrid user portal at portal.teragrid.org or the TeraGrid Web site. If you need further help with the allocations process, please send email to help@teragrid.org.