The National Science Board yesterday approved spending $35 million to connect the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's powerful Terascale computer with four supercomputers in Illinois and California, creating what will be called the TeraGrid.
The Pittsburgh computer, nicknamed LeMieux, itself is capable of up to 6 trillion computations a second, making it the country's most powerful computer for nonclassifed work. Linked with the other four machines, the TeraGrid will boast a capability of up to 20 trillion computations every second or 20 teraflops.
But sheer computational muscle is sort of beside the point, said Michael Levine, co-scientific director with Ralph Roskies of the Pittsburgh center.
"If our goal was to build a 20 teraflop machine, there are a lot easier ways to do it," Levine said. Rather, the National Science Foundation is looking to tie its big machines together to form a single resource, linking the machines with a high-speed network that can move data and computational problems to whatever machine is available, or most capable of solving a particular computational problem.
That will require a dedicated, optical-fiber network about 500,000 times faster than an Internet dial-up connection. Transmitting data at a rate of 30 billion bits, or gigabits, of data per second, the network could download the complete works of William Shakespeare 750 times every second.
It also will require special, yet-to-be-created software that will allow the different computers to work seamlessly with each other. Four of the sites -- the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Caltech, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, and Argonne National Laboratory -- already are linked together.
The existing network wasn't designed to be expanded or to accommodate a computer like LeMieux. Transforming the network into what the National Science Foundation is calling the Extensible Terascale Facility "is a tough undertaking," Levine said. But it should be up and running in some form in about a year, he added.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will receive just under $10 million of the $35 million approved for the project by the science board at its meeting yesterday in Arlington, Va.
In addition to the TeraGrid, the Pittsburgh center received money to upgrade the year-old Terascale machine, replacing more than 100 of its 3,000 computer processors with the next generation of Hewlett-Packard's Alpha processors. This new system, called Marvel, will enhance the computer's memory and improve the interconnections between the processors, Levine said.
The world's fastest computer is now the Earth Simulator, a Japanese computer capable of 40 teraflops. It is followed by the ASCI White, a computer used for classified research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a peak capability of 12 teraflops, and by Pittsburgh's LeMieux.
Byron Spice can be reached at bspice@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578.
Correction/Clarification: (Published Oct. 12, 2002) Friday's story about the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center said some of the Terascale computer's 3,000 computer processors are being replaced. Actually, about 100 new, next-generation processors are being added to the computing system.
