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Researchers Begin Testing Cross-Country Grid

Posted on: Tuesday, 4 March 2003, 06:00 CST

Researchers Begin Testing Cross-Country Grid

Source: CMPnet

Researchers have begun sending the first test data across a high-speed grid-computing network, funded by the National Science Foundation, that aims to link five national supercomputing centers.

The TeraGrid project, which aims to build a distributed supercomputer with a peak capacity of 20 teraflops and 1 petabyte of storage, said Monday that researchers have started sending test packets of data across a 40-Gbps fiber-optic network from Los Angeles to Chicago. The network links the TeraGrid's computers and storage systems. The project says the network operates at 10 million times the speed of a dial-up Internet connection.

When completed, the $88 million TeraGrid will link computing facilities at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Argonne National Laboratory, the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. IBM, Intel, and Qwest Communications are NSF's prime contractors on the project, which will be used to run biomolecular simulations, as well as weather forecasting, chemistry, and astronomy applications.

In the spring, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications plans to bring online its first TeraGrid hardware: IBM Linux clusters running Intel's Itanium 2 processor.

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