This project is a fifteen-month planning activity to develop a design for the successor to the TeraGrid project. This activity will engage researchers and educators in the refinement and validation of system requirements. The project includes the development of a detailed science case, concept of operations, design, and implementation plan for the eXtreme Digital (XD) Integrating Services. The primary goal of the next phase of the TeraGrid, XD, is to enable major advances in science and engineering research, in the integration of research and education, and in broadening participation in science and engineering by under-represented groups, by providing researchers and educators with usable access to extreme-scale digital resources, beyond those typically available on a typical campus, together with the interfaces, consulting support and training necessary to facilitate their use. The target for XD is innovation in the design and implementation of an effective, efficient, increasingly virtualized approach to the provision of high-end digital services ? extreme digital services - for researchers and educators. The XD infrastructure is intended to integrate extreme-scale digital resources and services into a common framework that makes it easy for researchers to take advantage of multiple resources and services, including the ability to move between using local resources and national resources within a single, well integrated environment.
The proposed activity is a planning activity for a project that, if successful, will provide infrastructure for research and education across a broad range of areas in science and engineering. In addition to users who are career researchers, it can reasonably be expected that this infrastructure will be used by several hundred graduate students and post-doctoral researchers each year as part of their research. The planning activity includes outreach to scientists and engineers from many fields.
