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NSF Fact Sheet

 

Media contact:

 David Hart

 (703) 292-7737

 dhart@nsf.gov

From Supercomputing to the Teragrid

September 2003

Early History: 1960s-1980s. National Science Foundation (NSF) investments in the nation's high-end computational infrastructure date back several decades. In the 1960s, NSF supported a number of campus computing centers across the country. However, by the early 1980s, several reports from the scientific community noted a dramatic lack of high-end computing resources available to academics. The December 1982 release of a joint agency study edited by Peter Lax catalyzed the re-emergence of significant NSF support for high-end computing.

Lax Report (1982): see http://www.pnl.gov/scales/archives.stm

Supercomputer Centers: 1985-1997. In 1985 and 1986, NSF established five supercomputer centers: the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, and the John von Neumann Center at Princeton University.

For 12 years, the centers' efforts pushed the limits of high-end computing hardware and software. Cornerstones of the nation's High-Performance Computing and Communications strategy, the centers provided access to supercomputers for academic research, regardless of discipline or the agency that funded the research.

In addition to providing access to supercomputers, the centers were instrumental in advancing the nation's network infrastructure. In 1986, the centers and the NSF-supported National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado became the first nodes on the NSFNET backbone. From 1989 to 1995, NCSA, PSC and SDSC helped push the frontiers of high-speed networking as participants in the then-bleeding-edge Gigabit Network Testbed Projects supported by NSF and DARPA. In 1995, after NSFNET was decommissioned, the centers became the first nodes on NSF's very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) for research and education.

In 1990, following a review of the supercomputer centers program, NSF extended support for the centers at Cornell, Illinois, Pittsburgh and San Diego through 1995. In 1994, the National Science Board approved a two-year continuation of the centers program through 1997, while a task force chaired by Edward Hayes considered the future of the program.

Hayes Report (1995): http://www.nsf.gov/pubsys/ods/getpub.cfm?nsf9646

Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure: 1997-present. Drawing on the recommendations in the Hayes report, NSF established a new program, Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), to build on and replace the centers program while continuing to meet the nation's high-end computing needs.

In March 1997, the National Science Board announced two PACI awardees: the National Computational Science Alliance, led by NCSA, and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, led by SDSC. In addition to the leading-edge sites, the partnerships involve nearly 100 sites across the country in efforts to make more efficient use of high-end computing in all areas of science and engineering. The partnerships also collaborate on education, outreach and training activities through EOT-PACI.

The Alliance and NPACI have continued to provide academic researchers with access to the most powerful computing resources available. These resources have included the first academic teraflops system-a computer capable of 1 trillion operations per second-and some of the first large-scale Linux clusters for academia. At the same time, the partnerships have been instrumental in fostering the maturation of "grid computing" and its widespread adoption by the scientific community and industry.

PACI partners are involved in virtually every major grid-computing initiative, from the Grid Physics Network to the National Virtual Observatory to the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. The PACI partners have also been driving forces in recognizing the critical scientific importance of and the technical challenges in accessing massive data collections.

PACI: http://www.paci.org/
EOT-PACI: http://www.eot.org/

Terascale Initiatives: 2000-present. In response to the 1999 report by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, NSF embarked on a series of "Terascale" initiatives to acquire computers capable of trillions of operations per second (teraflops), disk-based storage systems with capacities measured in trillions of bytes (terabytes), and networks with bandwidths of billions of bits (gigabits) per second.

In 2000, the $36 million Terascale Computing System award to PSC supported the deployment of a computer capable of 6 trillion operations per second, named LeMieux. Two years after going online, LeMieux remains one of the top 10 most powerful computers in the world and the most powerful in the U.S. for general academic research.

In 2001, NSF awarded $45 million to NCSA, SDSC, Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL, and the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at Caltech in Pasadena, CA, to establish a Distributed Terascale Facility. The aptly named TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for general scientific research. The initial TeraGrid specifications included computers capable of performing 11.6 teraflops, disk storage systems with capacities of more than 450 terabytes of data, visualization systems, data collections, integrated via grid middleware and linked through a 40-gigabits-per-second optical network.

In 2002, NSF made a $35 million Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) award to expand the capabilities of the initial TeraGrid sites and to integrate PSC's LeMieux system. The resources in the ETF will provide the national research community with more than 20 teraflops of computing power distributed among the five sites and nearly 1 petabyte (1 quadrillion bytes) of disk storage capacity.

In 2003, NSF made three Terascale Extensions awards totaling $10 million to further build upon the ETF's capabilities. The new awards fund the high-speed networking connections needed to share resources at Indiana and Purdue universities, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas, Austin, across the ETF infrastructure. Through the new awards, the ETF will put neutron-scattering instruments, large data collections and other unique resources, as well as additional computing resources, within reach of the nation's research and education community.

TeraGrid: http://www.teragrid.org/

 

 
 
     
 

 
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