Building the TeraGrid

Abstract

On 1 October 2004, the most ambitious high-performance Grid project in the United States—the TeraGrid—became fully operational. Resources at nine sites—the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the California Institute of Technology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Purdue University, Indiana University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory—were joined via an ultra-fast optical network, unified policies and security procedures and a sophisticated distributed computing software environment. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the TeraGrid enables scientists and engineers to combine distributed, multiple data sources with computation at any of the sites or link massively parallel computer simulations to extreme-resolution visualizations at remote sites. A single shared utility lets multiple resources be easily leveraged and provides improved access to advanced computational capabilities. One of the demonstrations of this new model for using distributed resources, Teragyroid, linked the infrastructure of the TeraGrid with computing resources in the United Kingdom via a transatlantic data fibre link. Once connected, the software framework of the RealityGrid project was used to successfully explore lattice-Boltzmann simulations involving lattices of over one billion sites.