XSEDE project funded by $121 million from National Science Foundation over five years
The National Science Foundation this month formally launched a project called the Extreme Digital Science and Engineering (XSEDE) project that’s designed to go beyond the roughly decade-old TeraGrid that has put about 10,000 researchers and scientists in touch with some 2.5 petaflops of high-performance computing resources across the United States.
The NSF is putting $121 million into XSEDE over 5 years in an effort to give researchers and scientists access not just to HPC resources, but also to data on other resources, remote networked instruments and perhaps most importantly, other researchers. John Towns, who is leading the NSF effort, explains the project further in the video below. “Really the key element here that we’ve been going after with XSEDE, is about productivity of researchers in conducting their day-to-day research. To establish such an environment, a distributed environment, with the resources and services accessible to them, is really a cornerstone of our planning. And you’ll note that I didn’t say HPC, I didn’t say compute resources. Because for some researchers, those are not as relevant as is access to data, as is access to collaboration tools, as is access to instruments,” Towns says.
Seventeen institutions are partnering on the project, which initially will connect 16 supercomputers. These include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Tennessee. The University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications leads the project.
