TeraGrid Allocations: April 18 Application Deadline

Scientists, engineers and other U.S. researchers can now apply by
April 18 for allocations of high-performance computer time, storage and
systems resources available through the TeraGrid, a partnership of 11
nationwide sites, sponsored by the Office of Cyberinfrastructure of the
National Science Foundation (NSF). The deadline was extended from April
15.

For this deadline, researchers may request mid-range
allocations up to 500,000 service units (SU) of computer time; each SU
represents one processor-hour a researcher can use on one of the
TeraGrid’s powerful compute systems. Proposals for allocations greater
than 500,000 SUs are due in July.
 
With the recent additions of
Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Kraken at the
National Institute for Computational Infrastructure (NICS), Queen Bee
at Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), Pople at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center (PSC) and Brutus at Purdue University, the total
computer capacity of the TeraGrid now approaches one petaflop. The full
list of 25 computing resources that are available is at http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/hardware/resources.php.

TeraGrid
also is making available large amounts of allocated tape and disk
storage, as well as servers dedicated to the delivery of data resources
via the web. These resources, available for use by individual
researchers, research groups, or virtual organizations, include:

• Archival
  storage under the control of High Performance Storage System (HPSS), up
  to 100 TB of storage per allocation, for persistent, long-term storage,
  from Indiana University (IU) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center
  (SDSC).
• Dedicated disk space, up to 25 TB per
  allocation, to support databases and data collections, from SDSC, IU,
  PSC, TACC and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
• Dedicated
  computational resources in support of Science Gateways or data
  resources (such as data resources that perform web-accessible or
  web-services accessible queries and computation) from NCSA and IU.
• Large shared memory machines from NCSA and PSC.

Researchers
can also apply for other resources, such as animation rendering
services from IU and Purdue University (the TeraDre resource). A
detailed list of data-centric and research- and education- oriented
TeraGrid resources available for allocation is described at http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/data/index.php.

Applications
are subject to peer review, similar to other major projects funded by
the NSF. However, TeraGrid does not re-review the scientific merit of
researchers with federally funded research; the existence of federal
funding is taken to confirm its scientific merit. For researchers who
already are funded, projects are evaluated primarily on the
appropriateness of the proposal for the cyberinfrastructure resources
requested.

Allocations approved for this cycle will begin July
1. Proposals for large allocations are reviewed twice a year, with the
next deadline for large allocations in July. Proposals for medium
requests are reviewed four times a year — with proposals due in
January, April, July, and October.

TeraGrid