"Following a $53 million grant for the National Science
Foundation, the University of Illinois' National Center for
Supercomputing Applications is working in partnership with four
other supercomputing centers to build a new high speed network
devoted to solving the world's most advanced scientific problems.
Dan Reed, director of NCSA, said the new Distributed Terascale
Facility will be 16 times faster than any available system.
According to Reed it will link research institutions around the
country into one central grid, known as the TeraGrid, and allow
them to access archived data and conduct high speed computer
simulations.
...The Distributed Terascale Facility will be based on two Linux
systems currently in operation at the NCSA. Each of these systems
can process data at the speed of one teraflop (trillions of
calculations per second). The new system will work at the speed of
13 teraflops and according to Reed will be "the fastest network in
the world for open scientific research." Reed said that such a
system would be able to process the entire amount of data on the
World Wide Web in a couple of hours. Only unclassified military
computers would be faster."
