NSF Funds Construction Of World's Biggest Computer GridNSF Funds Construction Of World's Biggest Computer Grid

The National Science Foundation has awarded $53 million to four U.S. research institutions to build what it calls the world's biggest multisite supercomputer. Under the plan, the NSF will provide funds to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago to build a Distributed Terascale Facility. The facility will use a grid-computing infrastructure to link thousands of smaller computers at each site into a virtual supercomputer that can be accessed by scientists and researchers performing complex calculations such as weather prediction and the mapping of the human genome.

The research institutions will build the infrastructure using IBM x-Series servers running the Linux operating system on Intel's yet-to-be-released 64-bit McKinley processor, the follow-on to Intel's Itanium chip. NSF officials say the system could go into operation as early as next year.

Each facility will build part of the system. NCSA will assemble an IBM cluster offering 8-teraflops of computing power with 240 terabytes of storage, and the San Diego center will install a 4-teraflop IBM cluster with 225 terabytes of storage. It also will use Sun Microsystems enterprise servers to help manage the data. Argonne will build a 1-teraflop IBM cluster to host software for advanced rendering and visualization. Finally, Caltech will use a .4-teraflop IBM cluster that will manage 86 terabytes of online storage. One teraflop represents one trillion floating-point operations per second. The individual computers will be combined over a network using open-source software from The Globus Project. Ultimately, the Distributed Terascale Facility will provide researchers with 11.6 teraflops of computing power. "An endeavor like this takes a village," SDSC director Fran Berman said during a conference call Thursday.

Analysts say the project represents a key win for both IBM and Intel. "It's a great foot in the door for them in terms of building the next generation of computing," says Technology Business Research analyst Bob Sutherland.