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 operation for the University of Chicago resource during the first six months of FY 05. The proposal focuses on the minimal resources that will allow for production use and a development of minimal services needed to produce a system that is useful to the community.
The focus of the UC resource beyond what is typical of TeraGrid resource providers is in two distinct areas. The first area is in providing production visualization services that enable users and tools and libraries for visualization and graphics developers. The second area is in operating a software development and testing platform for the TeraGrid IA-64 users. This testbed service will be of use to the entire TeraGrid community, providing infrastructure missing in the current system and enabling early access to new software stacks and to future versions of operating systems. Users will be able to access TeraGrid-aware visualization applications in a way that, to the user, appears to be a desktop visualization solution but in reality makes use of the rich TeraGrid visualization resources. Needed infrastructure will be provided for developers of specific visualization tools or parallel graphics. Over time this infrastructure will include access to low-level services that can be put together to form custom applications. The testbed service will support current and prototype TeraGrid software stacks on the IA-64 architecture for production analysis, will enable active testing of new software components, and will foster long-term development for TeraGrid user projects before wide-scale deployment.
