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Purdue achieved TeraGrid Status

  • Announcements

Thanks to the help of many ITaP staff, Purdue has achieved TeraGrid status. The TeraGrid is the National Science Foundation's largest cyberinfrastructure effort, and it is now in production mode. Purdue TeraGrid completed its construction phase, involving four core capabilities—networking, accounting, security, and software—and became the first Extensible Terascale Facility-2 (ETF-2) site to be in production. The ETF-2 expansion phase of the TeraGrid involves the addition of Purdue, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Indiana University , and Texas Advanced Computing Center.

TeraGrid project executive director and senior fellow at the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory, Charlie Catlett, says, “Through the TeraGrid partnership, we have built a distributed system of unprecedented scale.” The TeraGrid offers advanced computational, visualization, instrumentation, and data resources through its nine resource partner sites. Purdue, together with Indiana University , contributes more than 6 teraflops of computing capability, 400 terabytes of data storage capacity, and visualization resources.

In its efforts to come online as an ETF-2 site, Purdue delivered on time October 1 and ahead of other new sites, according to ITaP Research Scientist Sebastien Goasguen, who is the University's TeraGrid site lead. The Purdue TeraGrid team consists of ITaP staff in three units: Infrastructure, Security and Privacy, and Discovery. Goasguen says, “Everybody worked really hard, and we now perform really well as one team that spans three ITaP units.” The team includes: Scott Ballew, Ben Lewis, Bill Bormann, Todd Helfter, David Seidl, Rob Stanfield, Wendy Lin, Chris Baumbauer, Mike Shuey, Taezoon Park , Lan Zhao, Bill Whitson, Dale Talcott, Bryan Putnam, Dave Seaman, Dwight McKay, Laura Arns, and John Jackson.

Next, this team will make available some of Purdue's datasets, connect the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory to the network, work closely with the nanotechnology community needing these resources, and make use of the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization. Now that the Purdue TeraGrid site is in production, faculty and students can enjoy seamless access to computing and storage resources from Pittsburgh to San Diego via the fastest network backbone in the U.S. , Goasguen says.

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