news
Science | DOI: 10.1145/1897852.1897858
Kirk L. Kroeker
Grid computing’s future
Outreach programs and usability improvements are drawing
many researchers to grid computing from disciplines that have
not traditionally used such resources.
a grid-based computer simulation of the gravitational waves produced as two black holes merge with each other to form a larger black hole.
sCIentIFIC VIsualIZatIon by werner benger, aeI/ZIb/lsu/uIbk
In ReCent yeaRS, several pow- erfulresearch gridsconsisting of thousands of computing nodes, dozens of data cen- ters, and massive amounts of
bandwidth have emerged, but few of
these grids have received much attention in the mainstream media. Unlike
seti@home, folding@home, and other
highly focused grid projects that have
captured the popular imagination by
allowing home users to donate compute cycles, the big research grids are
not accessible to the public and their
fame does not extend far beyond the
researchers who use them. Outreach
teams and usability engineers at the
largest of these new grids, such as Na-regi, Egee, and TeraGrid, are trying to
change that reality by helping to facilitate the adoption of grid technologies
in fields that have not traditionally used
grid-based supercomputing resources.
TeraGrid, said to be the world’s largest distributed network infrastructure
for open scientific research, is one such
network that has quietly been making
waves in research communities outside computer science, and is helping
to solve complex problems in biology,
physics, medicine, and numerous other fields. TeraGrid consists of 11 data-center sites located around the U.S.
and is tied to a 10-gigabyte backbone
that connects primary network facili-
ties in Los Angeles, Denver, and Chi-
cago. At maximum capacity, TeraGrid
can produce more than a petaflop of
computing power and store more than
30 petabytes of data. The project, start-
ed by the National Science Foundation
in August 2001, has grown in the past
five years from fewer than 1,000 active
users in 2005 to nearly 5,000 active us-
ers working on almost 1,600 projects at
the end of 2009.
