The TeraGrid (TG) is an advanced, nationally distributed, open cyberinfrastructure (CI) comprised of supercomputing, storage, analysis, and visualization systems, data services, and science gateways, connected by high-bandwidth networks, integrated by coordinated policies and operations, and supported by computing and technology experts, that enables and supports leading-edge scientific discovery and promotes science and technology education.
The TG has enabled numerous scientific achievements in almost all fields of science and engineering. The TG is driven by researchers and educators requiring computational resources and services which would be extremely difficult or impossible to obtain in their local/campus environments. The largest fraction of TG resources are used in the support of peer-reviewed scientific and engineering projects enabled by the advanced CI resources of the TG. However, ?small? allocations are available to any individual willing to apply. Through the coordinated capabilities of its staff, resources, and services, TG enables cutting-edge, often transformative science and engineering, by experts and expert teams of users making highly-skilled use of TG resources. In addition, the TG also supports a wider community of much larger, domain-focused groups of users that may not possess specific high-performance computing skills but who are addressing important scientific research and education problems. The broader impact of TG activities include outreach to communities beyond the traditional set of HPC users, raising the awareness of future scientists in schools and science fairs on the power of computation and data mining, and spreading TG knowledge about how to build cyberinfrastructure, and how to bring it to the user community. Advanced support joins researchers with TG experts to increase efficiency and productivity, define best practices, and create a vanguard of early adopters of new capabilities. Support for Science Gateways provides community-designed interfaces to TG resources and extends access to data collections, community collaboration tools, and visualization capabilities to a much wider audience of users. Performing transformative science and engineering on the TG depends on its resources working in concert, which requires a coordinated user support system, centralized mechanisms for user access and information, a common allocations process and allocations management, and a coordinated user environment. Underlying this user support environment, the TG maintains a robust, centrally managed infrastructure for networking, security and authentication, and operational services. In this one year extension, the TG will. * Continue to support several resources into 2011. This includes the Track 2 systems, Pople (PSC), a shared memory system particularly useful to a number of newer users, three IA32-64 clusters and a new resource employing flash memory and virtual SMP nodes called DASH (SDSC). * Allow high-throughput, Open Science Grid-style jobs. * Enable exploration of interoperability and technology sharing. * Provide a transition platform for users coming from university- or departmental-level resources. * Support unique compute platforms and massive storage systems. * Integrate new systems from additional OCI awards. * Provide vigorous efforts in training, education and outreach to retain larger and more diverse communities in advancing scientific discovery. * Engage under-represented communities, and continue to build strong partnerships in order to offer the best possible HPC learning and workforce development programs and increase the number of well-prepared STEM researchers and educators.
The TeraGrid was an open cyberinfrastructure that enabled and supported leadingedge scientific discovery and promoted science and technology education. The TeraGrid comprised supercomputing and massive storage systems, visualization resources, data collections, and science gateways, connected by highbandwidth networks integrated by coordinated policies and operations, and supported by computational science and technology experts,. TeraGrid’s objectives were accomplished via a three-pronged strategy: to support the most advanced computational science in multiple domains (deep impact), to empower new communities of users (wide impact), and to provide resources and services that can be extended to a broader cyberinfrastructure (open infrastructure). This "deep, wide, and open" strategy guided the development, deployment, operations, and support activities to ensure maximum impact on science research and education across communities. When it ended, TeraGrid was an integrated, national-scale computational science infrastructure operated in a partnership comprising the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG), eleven Resource Provider (RP) institutions, and six Software Integration partners, with funding from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). Initially created as the Distributed Terascale Facility (with four partners) through a Major Research Equipment (MRE) award in 2001, the TeraGrid began providing production computing, storage, and visualization services to the national community in October 2004. In August 2005, NSF funded a five-year program to operate, enhance, and expand the capacity and capabilities of the TeraGrid to meet the growing needs of the science and engineering community through 2010, and then extended the TeraGrid an additional year into 2011 to provide an extended planning phase in preparation for TeraGrid Phase III eXtreme Digital (XD). Accomplishing this vision was crucial for the advancement of many areas of scientific discovery, ensuring US scientific leadership, and increasingly, for addressing important societal issues. TeraGrid achieves its purpose and fulfills its mission through a three?pronged strategy: Deep: ensure profound impact for the most experienced users, through provision of the most powerful computational resources and advanced computational expertise and enable transformational scientific discovery through leadership in HPC for highend computational research; Wide: enable scientific discovery by broader and more diverse communities of researchers and educators who can leverage TeraGrid’s high?end resources, portals and science gateways and increase the overall impact of TeraGrid’s advanced computational resources to larger and more diverse research and education communities through user interfaces and portals, domain specific gateways, and enhanced support that facilitate scientific discovery by people without requiring them to become high performance computing experts; and Open: facilitate simple integration with the broader cyberinfrastructure through the use of open interfaces, partnerships with other grids, and collaborations with other science research groups delivering and supporting open cyberinfrastructure facilities. The TeraGrid’s integrated resource portfolio evolved over the life of the project from an initial single integrated but distributed cluster to more than 20 high-performance computational (HPC) systems, several massive storage systems, and remote visualization resources, all supported by a dedicated interconnection network. This infrastructure was integrated at several levels: policy and planning, operational and user support, and software and services. The national, and global, user community that relied on TeraGrid grew tremendously to more than 10,000 total lifetime users. To support the great diversity of research activities and their wide range in resources needs, user support and operations teams leveraged the expertise across all of the TeraGrid Resource Providers. In addition, users benefited greatly from our coordinated education, outreach, and training activities. TeraGrid’s diverse set of HPC resources provided a rich computational science environment. These resources were available via a central allocations and accounting process for the national academic community. The project saw many varied resources come and go throughout its duration and as it drew to a close made way for the transition to the follow-on XD program.
