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 the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) as part of the TeraGrid. TACC has developed a comprehensive TeraScale infrastructure at UT Austin and will provide many significant resources to TeraGrid users: a Linux cluster with 1028 processors for high-end computing; a Sun SMP system with 512 GB shared memory and 16 dual-pipe, high-end graphics cards for visualization and data analysis; a 50 TB storage area network and a massive archival system for data storage; and four unique geosciences data collections from leading research units at UT Austin. TACC will operate and support all of these resources as production systems and integrate them into the TeraGrid using the appropriate software components. TACC staff will provide services and support to ensure maximum effective use of these resources, including HPC and visualization applications support and outreach, consulting, training, and documentation, as well as data collection curation and user support. TACC will also operate the TeraGrid User Portal, working with all other TeraGrid resource providers to ensure that the portal provides up-to-date information services and reliable, simple interactive ways of using TeraGrid resources and accessing TeraGrid services.
