SCI: Extended Terascale Facility: Early Operations

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), or "TeraGrid," involves nine resource providers operating high performance computing, information, and visualization facilities, interconnected with a dedicated optical network and integrated with a set of common software that presents the user community with a cohesive set of resources and services. On October 1, 2004, the ETF will conclude a three-year construction effort to create this distributed environment and will transition into an operational state. This proposal outlines a set of services to be provided at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) as part of the TeraGrid system. Scientists are facing an increasing deluge of data for which they need the ability to manage, curate, analyze, mine, and synthesize into information and knowledge. SDSC is bringing a powerful set of compute and storage resources to TeraGrid, with a focus on moving traditional supercomputing deep into the data-intensive domain. Examples include providing both powerful dedicated database and I/O servers and extending all computational nodes with direct Storage Area Network (SAN) attachments and database client software.