At 40 gigabits per second, the new "backplane," developed in partnership with Qwest Communications, will connect the resources of the TeraGrid, a multiyear effort to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, distributed computing infrastructure for open scientific research. Scientists will use the TeraGrid to make fundamental discoveries in fields as varied as biomedicine, global climate, and astrophysics. The first applications will begin to use the TeraGrid capabilities from all sites this spring.

The TeraGrid partners are the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC); Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne); the Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR); and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). When completed, the TeraGrid will include 20 teraflops of computing power, facilities capable of managing and storing nearly one petabyte of data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing.

The backplane consists of four 10 Gb/s optical fiber "lambdas" (light pipelines) running from a major Internet hub in Los Angeles to the StarLight hub in Chicago and three 10 Gb/s lambdas to each site. Juniper Networks provided the routers—the first in the nation available to handle the combined 40 Gb/s fiber traffic.

"With our network operational, the scientific research community will soon gain access to a rich set of computing and data management resources and grid infrastructure that will transform computational science and engineering," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and chief architect of the TeraGrid project. "This network backplane is optimized for the communication requirements of the largest scientific applications, and it will make possible the next generation of scientific breakthroughs."

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bombholio