NSF PR 01-67 - August 9, 2001
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Distributed Terascale Facility to Commence with
$53 Million NSF Award
High-performance computing system will come on-line
in mid-2002
The world’s first multi-site supercomputing system
-- Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) -- will be
built and operated with $53-million from the National
Science Foundation (NSF). The DTF will perform 11.6-trillion
calculations per second and store more than 450-trillion
bytes of data, with a comprehensive infrastructure
called the “TeraGrid” to link computers, visualization
systems and data at four sites through a 40-billion
bits-per-second optical network.
The National Science Board (NSB) today approved a three-year
NSF award, pending negotiations between NSF and a
consortium led by the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) in Illinois and the San Diego
Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in California, the two
leading-edge sites of NSF’s Partnerships for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (PACI). NCSA and SDSC
will be joined in the DTF project by Argonne National
Laboratory (ANL) in suburban Chicago and the California
Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.
"The DTF will be a tremendous national resource," said
NSF director Rita Colwell. "With this innovative facility,
NSF will demonstrate a whole new range of capabilities
for computer science and fundamental scientific and
engineering research, setting high standards for 21st
Century deployment of information technology."
"Terascale" refers to computers that perform more than
one trillion floating-point operations per second,
called "teraflops." The DTF would begin operation
in mid-2002, reaching peak performance of 11.6 teraflops
by April 2003. The facility will support research
such as storm, climate and earthquake predictions;
more-efficient combustion engines; chemical and molecular
factors in biology; and physical, chemical and electrical
properties of materials.
"This facility will stretch the boundaries of high-performance
computing and give U.S. computer scientists and other
researchers in all science and engineering disciplines
access to a critical new resource," said NSB chair
Eamon Kelly.
Adds Ruzena Bajcsy, NSF assistant director for Computer
and Information Science and Engineering, "The DTF
can lead the way toward a ubiquitous 'Cyber-Infrastructure'
in which the national Grid of research networks will
permit calculations, storage and throughput at tera
levels. This facility will serve the high-end computational
science community, help train the next generation
of information-technology professionals and propagate
the latest technology for maximum public benefit."
The partnership will work primarily with IBM, Intel
Corporation and Qwest Communications to build the
facility, along with Myricom, Oracle Corporation and
Sun Microsystems. "The DTF will be the most comprehensive
information infrastructure ever deployed for open
scientific research, and we feel privileged to have
a leadership role in this historic effort," said NCSA
director Dan Reed and SDSC director Fran Berman in
a joint statement. "The TeraGrid will integrate the
most-powerful computers, software, networks, dataaccess
systems and applications, creating a unique national
resource that will catalyze new breakthroughs and
yield unforeseen benefits for all of society." Berman
and Reed are DTF co-principal investigators.
Each of the four DTF sites will play a unique role
in the project:
- NCSA will lead the project’s computational
aspects with an IBM Linux cluster powered by Intel’s
second-generation 64-bit Itanium family processor,
code-named “McKinley.” Peak performance will be
6.1 teraflops with the cluster, which will work
in tandem with existing hardware to reach 8 teraflops
with 240 terabytes of secondary storage.
- SDSC will lead the project’s data- and
knowledge-management effort with a 4-teraflops
IBM Linux cluster based on Intel’s McKinley processor,
with 225 terabytes of storage and a next generation
Sun high-end server for managing access to Grid
distributed data.
- Argonne will have a 1-teraflop IBM Linux
cluster to host advanced software for high-resolution
rendering, remote visualization and advanced Grid
software.
- Caltech will focus on scientific data,
with a .4-teraflop McKinley cluster and a 32-node
IA-32 cluster that will manage 86 terabytes of
on-line storage.
The DTF project director will be Rick Stevens, who
is a computer science faculty member at the University
of Chicago and director of the mathematics and computer
science division of ANL, a U.S. Department of Energy
laboratory. "I'm excited by this opportunity to help
build on prior NSF and PACI successes," said Stevens,
"and it is a wonderful example of interagency cooperation."
The DTF will join a previous terascale facility commissioned
by NSF in 2000. That system, located at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center, came on-line ahead of schedule
in early 2001 and is expected to reach peak performance
of 6 teraflops in October.
NSF is an independent federal agency that supports
fundamental research and education across all fields
of science and engineering, with an annual budget
of about $4.5 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states,
through grants to about 1,800 universities and institutions
nationwide. Each year, NSF receives about 30,000 competitive
requests for funding, and makes about 10,000 new funding
awards.
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