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In FY 2001 NSF seeks to open a pathway to future computing,
communications, and information environments by creating a very
large-scale system that is part of the rapidly expanding
computational Grid1. NSF will
establish an advanced, multi-site "distributed facility" connected
by ultra high-speed networking that will significantly enhance the
capabilities of U.S. researchers in all areas of computational,
computer, and information science and engineering. This environment
will include at least one single-site computing system capable of
five or more teraflops per second (peak) performance. However,
since modern scientific and engineering research requires more than
just computational capability, this terascale computer system will
be embedded within an overall system that also provides
sophisticated data handling and interaction with remote sites. This
distributed facility will include substantial support for
accessing, analyzing, processing, transmitting, and visualizing
multi-terabyte data collections of current and future interest to
the U.S. research community. This will require the DTF to have
terabytes to petabytes of online and archival storage available for
user access and multi-gigabit per second network connectivity. The
DTF will be fully coordinated with the resources and activities of
the existing PACI partnerships. Special consideration will be given
to qualified proposals that utilize newer generation processors and
other High Performance Computing equipment. Full exploitation of
this new computational environment will be enabled by fundamental
computer science research on new algorithms, data structures,
system software, information mining and visualization techniques,
and collaborative environments for data exploration and analysis.
1. "The word 'grid' is chosen by analogy with the
electric power grid, which provides pervasive access to power and,
like the computer and a small number of other advances, has had a
dramatic impact on human capabilities and society. We believe that
by providing pervasive, dependable, consistent and inexpensive
access to advanced computational capabilities, databases, sensors,
and people, computational grids will have a similar transforming
effect, allowing new classes of applications to emerge." From the
Preface to The Grid, Blueprint for a New Computing
Infrastructure, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. (1999), edited
by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman.
NSF Document: NSF 02-116
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