One Big Grid

Mechanical Engineering, Jan 2007 by Thilmany, Jean

SCIENTISTS AND RESEARCHERS involved in the TeraGrid project met face-to-face, many for the first time, at an Indianapolis conference late last year devoted to the grid.

The TeraGrid marries the supercomputing power of eight institutions: the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Chicago-Argonne National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Purdue University, Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The grid offers more than 100 teraflops of computing ability. That's 100 trillion floating point operations per second, or about the same computing capability as 28,000 desktop computers.

Scientists use the grid to conduct complex experiments like modeling climate, predicting earthquakes, and forecasting weather, said Sebastien Goasguen, a senior information technology research scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. He was the conference co-chair.

For example, the San Diego Supercomputing Center led a project that simulated a 7.7 magnitude earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, working with researchers at the University of Oklahoma, developed weather forecasts that accurately predicted thunderstorms within a 20-mile radius and within 30 minutes of when they actually occurred, Goasguen said.

By creating 3-D animated visualizations, George Karniadakis, a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University in Providence, R.I., used the grid to study the way blood flows through arteries. Because the 3-D models required more computer memory than a single computer could provide, the computations for this model were distributed across the TeraGrid, he said.