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Natl Science Foundation to fund $53 m supercomputer

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CIOL Bureau
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Duncan Martell

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SAN FRANCISCO: The National Science Foundation said it will spend $53 million
to build a massive computing grid that will be the most powerful of its kind
ever completed and could lead to ground-breaking research that would have
otherwise taken years, if not decades, to complete.

Called the Distributed Terascale Facility, or DTF, it will be used by four US
research centers for research in areas including molecular modeling for
detecting diseases, cures and drug discovery, research on alternative energy
sources, climate and atmospheric simulations, among others.

The current grid, which is the latest example of distributed computing that
is becoming increasing popular, will be able to process 13.6 trillion
calculations per second and will boast some 600 terabytes of data storage, the
equivalent of 146 million full-length novels. To put that computational power in
perspective, it would take one person with a calculator about 10 million years
to tabulate the number of calculations the proposed grid could in a single
second.

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"All these (scientific) instruments are producing enormous amounts of
scientific data and the challenge is mining these data to get some scientific
insights," said Daniel Reed, director for the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign on a conference call. "This will transform, we believe,
the way science and engineering research is done."

Once completed in late 2002, it will be the largest, most comprehensive
computing infrastructure ever built for scientific research. DTF will be more
than a thousand times faster than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, which defeated
chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1996.

The DTF, which will be connected using Qwest Communications International
Inc.'s 40-gigabit-per-second network, will be built by International Business
Machines Corp., using Intel Corp.'s Itanium microprocessors and the Linux
operating system. More than a thousand IBM servers and 3,300 next-generation
Itanium McKinley chips will comprise the DTF.

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The other research institutions involved in the project are the San Diego
Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego, Argonne
National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.

Unlike traditional supercomputers, which are typically housed at a single
location, grids allow for pools of computing resources by connecting multiple
supercomputers that are often in different locations via the Internet using
open-source protocols from Globus. Globus is an organization seeking to set
standards for grid computing similar to the standards that were set up to run
the World Wide Web.

Because of the open-source standards in creating the grid, a large benefit is
the ability to plug other supercomputers and systems that aren't based on Intel
chips and Linux into the DTF to boost performance and compute capacity even
more.

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IBM has established itself as a leader in the emerging arena of grid
computing, in which computing power becomes a resource and a service, much as
with an electric utility. Users, for example, would pay for as much of the
computing resources that they use, harkening back to time-sharing on old
supercomputers, but modernized by super-high-speed data networks.

"The goal is not to sell each of the companies in the Fortune 1000 a $50
million computer, which would be nice for us, but it's what's the best way to
distribute compute power into the hands of our customers," said David Turek,
vice president of emerging technologies for IBM.

"You simply focus on getting the work done and, in the analogy of an
electric utility, you don't have to worry about how your turbine is
spinning," Turek said.

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While big for IBM, the win is also of note for Intel, the world's largest
semiconductor maker. Itanium is Intel's first foray into super-high-end
computing, and the company is seeking to establish Itanium as a formidable force
in a part of the high-tech market place now dominated by rival Sun Microsystems
Inc. and IBM.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.

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