The Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), or TeraGrid, involves nine resource providers operating high-performance computing, information, and visualization facilities, interconnected with a dedicated optical network and integrated with a set of common software that presents the user community with a cohesive set of resources and services. On October 1, 2004, the ETF will conclude a three-year construction effort to create this distributed environment and will transition into an operational state. This proposal outlines a set of services to be provided at Purdue University as part of the TeraGrid infrastructure.
Purdue University will provide a heterogeneous set of compute resources made of an IBM SP supercomputer (265 cpus) and a linux cluster (960 cpus). Purdue will also operate a 10Gbps network connection to the Chicago hub linking Purdue to the TeraGrid backbone. Datasets from the remote sensing scientific community will be made available on the TeraGrid, specifically data from the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory (PTO) that will come on-line during the fall of 2004 and will be production ready in the early spring of 2005. Purdue University is also a National Weather Service (NWS) Tier-2 Doppler Radar images provider. This data will be made available uncurated on the TeraGrid. Visualization resources of the Purdue Envision Center will be available for use by TeraGrid users. Finally, the Purdue TeraGrid team has worked closely with the NSF Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) submitting an NRAC community allocation to get NCN users on the TeraGrid and to connect the NCN application portal to the TeraGrid resources. This partnership with the NCN will continue and will be enhanced in the limit of the resources available.
