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History

Terascale Initiatives: 2000-2004

In 2000, the $36 million Terascale Computing System award to PSC supported the deployment of a computer (named LeMieux) capable of 6 trillion operations per second. When LeMieux went online in 2001, it was the most powerful U.S. system committed to general academic research.

The TeraGrid began in 2001 when NSF awarded $45 million to NCSA, SDSC, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at California Institute of Technology, to establish a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF). The DTF became known to users as the TeraGrid, a multi-year effort to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for general scientific research.

The initial TeraGrid specifications included computers capable of performing 11.6 teraflops, disk-storage systems with capacities of more than 450 terabytes of data, visualization systems, data collections, integrated via grid middleware and linked through a 40-gigabits-per-second optical network.

In 2002, NSF made a $35 million Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) award to expand the initial TeraGrid to include PSC and integrate PSC's LeMieux system. Resources in the ETF provide the national research community with more than 20 teraflops of computing power distributed among the five sites and nearly one petabyte (one quadrillion bytes) of disk storage capacity.

To further expand the TeraGrid's capabilities, NSF made three Terascale Extensions awards totaling $10 million in 2003. The new awards funded high-speed networking connections to link the TeraGrid with resources at Indiana and Purdue Universities, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas, Austin. Through these awards, the TeraGrid put neutron-scattering instruments, large data collections and other unique resources, as well as additional computing and visualization resources, within reach of the nation's research and education community.

In 2004, as a culmination of the DTF and ETF programs, the TeraGrid entered full production mode, providing coordinated, comprehensive services for general U.S. academic research.

The TeraGrid: 2005-2010

In August 2005, NSF's newly created Office of Cyberinfrastructure extended support for the TeraGrid with a $150 million set of awards for operation, user support and enhancement of the TeraGrid facility over the next five years. Using high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid now integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. As of May 2007, TeraGrid integrated resources include more than 250 teraflops of computing capability and more than 30 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Researchers can also access more than 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.