- In 1986-98, the National Science Foundation (NSF) formed the backbone of the modern
Internet by funding supercomputing centers. NSFNet linked these
centers together, following on DARPANet which was a similar effort
for the military that started in the late 1960s.
- In 2002, the NSF launched the national TeraGrid, which is
in many ways a next-generation project to go beyond networking,
and look at how a national metacomputer can be built using
large computing resources and fast networks.
- The TeraGrid started with NCSA,
SDSC, Argonne National Labs. Just this
year, new sites are being added including PSC and Indiana.
- The TeraGrid offers supercomputing facilities (mostly cluster
based, including some of the worlds
fastest clusters), huge storage (over 1/2 petabyte on disk, more
on tape, and fast interconnects.
- Logins are available mainly to academic researchers.
- Each site is operated independently, but with some centralized
coordination and some common policy. After the well-publicized breakins this spring, each site
greatly enhanced security, but in some slightly different ways
(certificates, kerberos and ssh).
- Related to the Teragrid is the software alliance, NPACI, and the National Middleware
Initiative. These consist of consortia, organizations and
projects to make the TeraGrid and underlying software work, as well as
enabling grid-standards projects at any site that chooses to use the
same set of tools.
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