Supercomputing gets $148m cash injection

The National Science Foundation (NSF) will spend $148m more during the next five years to expand the Extensible Terascale Facility, a collection of interconnected supercomputing facilities also called the TeraGrid.

The NSF has funded the TeraGrid for years. The project began as a pair of Itanium-based clusters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and San Diego Supercomputing Center but expanded to include the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and several other sites.

Of the new funding, $48m will go to an effort led by the University of Chicago to build the overall system, integrate software, run operations and co-ordinate user support, the federal funding agency said on Wednesday. The remaining $100m will fund operations and support at eight other sites involved in TeraGrid.

About 1,000 scientists have used the TeraGrid directly so far, a number the organisation predicts will increase to at least 3,000 by 2009. Research projects on the system include studying brain mechanisms, storm forecasting, diagnosing diseases, predicting earthquake effects, planning groundwater decontamination projects and studying the "dark energy" involved in the expansion of the universe.

Other sites involved in running the TeraGrid are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University and Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com