The Future of Teragrid

By Nisansa Perera

Teragrid is a computing cyber infrastructure for scientific research at US, and it is the world's largest distributed cyber infrastructure for open scientific research. It has about 750 teraflops computation capability and 30 petabytes storage (roughly equivalent to 100000 desktops, considering quard core 2GHz, with 200 GB disks) distributed across number of partner sites (Including Indiana University's Bigred Cluster) connected by a 10G network.
Currently lot of planning going on about future of TaraGrid and details can be found in http://teragridfuture.org. A one thing that interests me was series of position papers that discusses future possibilities, and suggestions. May be this is a nice usecase for new ideas like cloud computing (What ever it is !!) and virtualization.

To add a side comment, a friend brought a new laptop (New Mac), and as we find out while doing a Gram performance on TeraGrid, the laptop is almost as twice as powerful as some TaraGrid headnodes (I am talking about a node, not the whole cluster). So much for powerful computers, and we can see the Moore's law really in action here. Actually these super computers have about 3-4 year lifetime, and by that time new machines comes with twice computing power and almost half-power consumption, their power need soon make them obsolete.