Pittsburgh Supercomputer Links to Cyberinfrastructure

Researchers have linked a supercomputer in Pittsburgh to others in Illinois and California, which will soon make it possible to perform 20 trillion calculations per second and enable academic researchers to harness that power no matter where they're located. The capacity and speed makes it possible to develop more realistic models for a variety of research, including cosmology, weather and medicine.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's computer is part of the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation program to build the world's fastest computer for open scientific research.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is in charge of the $88 million project. The other TeraGrid partners are the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Argone National Laboratory in Illinois and the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research.

Having the Pittsburgh supercomputer (dubbed LeMieux after Pittsburgh Penguins owner/player Mario Lemieux) linked with the other supercomputers is important because it uses different software and hardware than the others, according to Trish Barker, a spokeswoman for the NCSA.

"We're helping to demonstrate that it doesn't have to be a homogenous environment," said Gwendolyn Huntoon, associate director of networking at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

Researchers recently successfully tested the LeMieux connection, which is currently operating at 10 gigabits per second and will increase to 30 gigabits this fall when two more fiber optic lines are installed. (One gigabit per second is about a thousand times faster than a typical home broadband connection.)

"When you put it all together, it makes it this a very large distributed computing resource," Huntoon said.

While supercomputers are expected to have spin-off technological developments that will eventually filter down to consumers, the real benefit is for various scientific work, researchers said.

This should enable researchers to do projects that they couldn't do in the past much faster," Huntoon said.

In a way, the TeraGrid is analogous to the country's power grid; a homeowner doesn't need to know where the power comes from for a light bulb to work.

Scientists "don't need to worry about what the technology is that underlies that, they can just access the resources so they can focus on the science," Barker said.

Scientists also don't need to be at one of the five TeraGrid locations.

"The whole point of grid computing is for you to access a whole world of capabilities no matter where you are," said Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Currently, the fastest supercomputer is Japan's Earth Simulator, which operates at 35.6 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, in conjunction with Westinghouse Electric Co. that began in 1986.

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