[CAnet - news] Details on TeraGrid's $150m expansion plans

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[Excerpts from GridToday article.  TeraGrid represents the next generation
integration of optical lightpaths and distributed computational facilities
--BSA]

        

The National Science Foundation recently announced a five-year initiative
with $150 million in funding to operate and enhance TeraGrid, a distributed
national infrastructure supporting computational science. 

The new TeraGrid award includes $48 million to provide overall architecture,
software integration, operations and coordination of user support. 


One major change that this funding brings is the creation of the Grid
Infrastructure Group, or "GIG."  The GIG is a new team of about 40 staff who
have responsibility for the overall management, planning, operation, common
software and services, and evolution of TeraGrid. It's also a team that
capitalizes on expertise at each of today's partner sites, so it is woven
into the fabric of the partnership that built the initial system.

Programmatically, we have created three interlocking initiatives that serve
as organizing principles for TeraGrid. We refer to them as TeraGrid "Deep,"
"Wide" and "Open."

TeraGrid "Deep" is an extension of what we focused on primarily during the
first phase of the project. TeraGrid partners provide some of the world's
most powerful resources, and we are working with scientists to integrate
them so that the resources can be harnessed to enable new discoveries that
would not be possible otherwise. We have a hands-on science support team
that consists of about 15 people who are working with TeraGrid users to tune
their applications to exploit this distributed infrastructure.

TeraGrid "Wide" is a new program that is making this complex infrastructure
more accessible to a much broader community than have been able to use high
performance computing to date. This program involves a set of prototype
"science gateways" where we are developing the processes and policies to
provide TeraGrid access to scientists through Web portals, desktop tools,
and even local clusters and Grid systems. Essentially, we are partnering
with groups who provide infrastructure for their communities, and we are
supercharging their infrastructure by enabling them to "back-end" their
services with TeraGrid computational, storage or other services. This is
also a program that is open, as the major work we are doing is in defining
the policies, processes and support structures that allow science
communities to "plug" their systems into TeraGrid.

Finally, TeraGrid "Open" is what is driving the evolution of our software
and services, with the goal of interoperation with other Grid systems, as
well as readily including resources from new partners into the TeraGrid
environment. We are partnering with the Open Science Grid and the NSF
Middleware Initiative to chart a path where we are increasingly sharing
common middleware and where our software environments are progressively
making it easier for users to move their applications between autonomous
Grid infrastructures.

..NSF believes TeraGrid and Grid computing in general can provide important
integrating components of "cyberinfrastructure." TeraGrid relies on Grid
computing technology and the community that is advancing that technology,
but TeraGrid is not fundamentally about Grid computing. It's about enabling
scientific discovery, with Grid computing as a key part of the
cyberinfrastructure necessary for that aim.


Science Gateways, one of the most exciting things we are doing, and I
believe this kind of work will create a real inflection point in terms of
the number of people able to take advantage of high performance computing
resources. Initially, we developed a set of about 10 science gateway
partners, with a variety of implementations ranging from Web portals to
desktop applications to community-specific computing and Grid
infrastructures.

Cyberinfrastructure is riding on new Grid and Web capabilities, including
Web services, as well as continued increases in computing, networking and
storage power. Cyberinfrastructure will combine these things to bring more
sophisticated capabilities to the table, so you'll be able to ask more
interesting questions. Instead of asking, "How did this portfolio of stocks
perform over the past year?" you'll be able to ask, "How might this
portfolio perform if gas prices hit $3.50 a gallon?"

Today we have about 550 projects and in two weeks our quarterly peer-review
process will be adding to that number, so we are likely to be at around 700
very soon. I am particularly interested in those applications that are
pioneering ways to exploit this unique distributed system. Most are using
the environment to support a workflow approach, where they no longer need to
do all of their work on systems within one room. One of the focus areas of
our science gateways program is to provide workflow tools to make this
easier to do. Others are literally treating the system like a big machine
room, selecting the largest computational resource available at a given time
to run their applications while storing and analyzing the data at their
favorite center.




  
    ______________________________________________________________________
           Full background information on all sponsoring companies
       Firms marked with an * have updated their info in the last 30 days 


                 [ ] A381 ) HP
                 [ ] A383 ) Intel
                 [ ] A382 ) Sun
                 [ ] A704 ) Digipede


           For sponsorship information contact: [email protected]
     ______________________________________________________________________ 




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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

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[email protected]
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