NCSA's TeraGrid Deployment Effort to be Part of Computerworld Honors Collection

released 01.21.03

Contact

Karen Green NCSA Public Information Officer kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu 217.265.0748

CHAMPAIGN, IL — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and its work deploying IntelŪ ItaniumŪ 2 clusters as part of the TeraGrid project will become part of a library of cutting-edge information technology projects that is distributed to museums, libraries, and institutions around the world.

Called the Computerworld Honors Collection, this archive recognizes organizations whose use of information technology has been especially noteworthy for its originality, the breadth of its vision, and the significance of its benefits to society. Chairpersons and CEOs of the world's foremost information technology companies select organizations in 10 categories for inclusion in the archive. NCSA's work in developing cluster computers based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 architecture was nominated in the science category by Intel CEO Craig Barrett. Rob Pennington, head of NCSA's Computing and Data Management directorate and site lead on the TeraGrid project, submitted a case study on the effort to deploy the Itanium 2 clusters. That case study will become one of the more than 4,000 case studies included in the archive.

This year's additions will be formally added to the collection at a ceremony on April 6 at San Francisco's City Hall. Pennington and other 2003 contributors to the archive will receive medals in recognition of their service to society and will attend a formal dinner that evening. At the evening event, a top new entry will be selected in each of 10 categories: business and related services; education and academia; environment; energy and agriculture; finance; insurance and real estate; government and non-profit organizations; manufacturing; media; arts and entertainment; medicine; transportation; and science.

"Everyone involved in deploying our Itanium 2 Linux clusters should take pride in this recognition," said NCSA Director Dan Reed. "With corporate partners such as Intel, we are helping create a new paradigm for scientific computing, and now some of the most prestigious names in information technology have recognized that."

NCSA's Itanium clusters will total 10 teraflops when installation is complete later this year and will be the largest single system in the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. The $88 million TeraGrid will be the world's largest distributed computing infrastructure for open scientific research, consisting of 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at five sites, facilities capable of managing and storing nearly 1 petabyte of data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing.

For more on the Computerworld Honors Program, see http://www.program@cwheroes.org/home.asp.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies . For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.