TeraGrid Clusters Successfully Installed at NCSA

released 01.21.03

Contact

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

CHAMPAIGN, IL — The first supercomputers made possible through the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project award were successfully installed over the last few weeks at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The TeraGrid delivery consists of 256 IBM cluster nodes that will run Linux and have a peak performance of two teraflops. The cluster is powered by 512 1 GHz Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. Half of the nodes are equipped with four gigabytes (GBs) of memory per node; the other half are large-memory processors with 12 GBs of memory per node, making them ideal for running memory-intensive applications. The delivery also included 60 terabytes of local disk storage.

"This is the beginning of the deployment of the largest distributed computing resource ever made available to the open research community," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and chief architect for the TeraGrid project. "New collaborations will be made possible, as will scientific breakthroughs that we can't yet imagine."

According to Rob Pennington, head of NCSA's Computing and Data Management division and NCSA's site lead for the TeraGrid project, the recent installation marks the largest configuration of TeraGrid compute nodes to date.

"We are well on our way to developing something completely new, and NCSA will be home to the majority of the power for this unique system," he said.

When completed, 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. NCSA will be home to 10 teraflops of the TeraGrid's total computing power. This will complement other onsite Linux clusters for a total of 12 teraflops of computing power at the center. Delivery of another 8 teraflops of Itanium-powered nodes is expected at NCSA this summer.

The other TeraGrid sites—the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Argonne National Laboratory, the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center—also installed equipment during the past month.

Pennington said he expects the TeraGrid machines to enter friendly user mode by March and to be available to the full scientific research community by summer.

For more on TeraGrid, see http://www.teragrid.org/.