TeraGrid

» see teragrid.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

TeraGrid was the National Science Foundation's answer to a problem American researchers kept running into. Every supercomputer in the country had its own account system and its own way of getting data in and out, so a scientist who needed two machines needed two of everything else as well. The program launched in August 2001 with $53 million and four sites: NCSA at Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Argonne under the University of Chicago, and Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research.

Money kept arriving. Pittsburgh joined in October 2002 with another $35 million behind it, and in October 2003 a further $10 million brought in Oak Ridge, Purdue, Indiana and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at Austin. Construction finished in October 2004 and the facility went into full production on the first of that month. In August 2005 the NSF's new office of cyberinfrastructure extended everything for five more years with $150 million, of which $48 million went to the coordinating group at the University of Chicago under Charlie Catlett.

You did not sign up for TeraGrid. You applied. A development allocation came off an abstract describing the work you wanted to do, and anything larger went through a quarterly review where other scientists read the proposal and decided. Roughly four thousand people at more than two hundred universities held accounts, and by late 2009 the pooled resource had grown to about two petaflops with over sixty petabytes of storage behind it, all of it on a dedicated 10 gigabit backbone with hubs in Chicago and Los Angeles. From 2006 the Science Gateways program put web front ends on top of it so that a biologist never had to see a queue.

It ended on 30 June 2011. Nothing failed and nobody ran out of money: the award simply reached its last day. In July a partnership of seventeen institutions announced XSEDE with $121 million of NSF funding for five years, and the users walked across without an outage.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the european half of the same idea ~

TeraGrid was not the only machine of its kind and grid computing was not an American invention. DEISA was doing the same welding job across eleven European supercomputing centers, with EGEE running the layer underneath a great deal of that, and Japan had been building NAREGI since 2003. Turkey sat in the European camp. TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM opened a high performance computing center in 2003 with 128 PCs bought out of its own budget, built it out under the TUGA project between 2006 and 2008, and ran the national grid as TR-Grid until it was renamed TRUBA in 2011, the same year TeraGrid closed.

I was at university in Turkey for most of TeraGrid's run and never had an account on either grid. Undergraduate work in Ankara did not come with a peer-reviewed allocation on a petaflop machine, and the biggest computer I touched in those years belonged to a department lab. This was infrastructure for people whose research needed it, in a country that was not mine.

~ what xsede inherited ~

Not all of it. At the end of July 2011 a set of TeraGrid machines left the federation rather than joining the successor: Big Red at Indiana, Queen Bee at LONI, Frost at NCAR, Athena at NICS, Pople at Pittsburgh and Ember at NCSA. What carried over was the software stack and the allocation process. The users came with them. XSEDE ran until 31 August 2022 and was replaced by ACCESS, so the thing TeraGrid started is on its third name now.

The website went first. www.teragrid.org stopped serving its own pages in the autumn of 2011 and spent the next five years answering every request with a redirect to xsede.org/tg-archives. The domain still resolves in 2026, to an address at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, and answers nothing at all on either port.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »