News Item Dated: 04 December 2002
From: Chronicle of Higher Education Online  (11/27/02); Olsen, Florence

Research organizations and governments are working to create supercomputing grids that will provide the aggregate computing resources of the group to any connected node. Intel's Rick Herrmann says universities that have for the last few years invested in supercomputing clusters are taking the next step to link those facilities with other sites. Software will play a large part in the uptake of future grid computing efforts, and grid researchers are working to create an easy-to-use Web interface so that experts in other fields can tap computing power as a utility, like electricity or water.

Besides several grid computing projects being developed among research institutions in the United States, Herrmann says that China is also building a grid network linking 100 universities in that country. He notes that in the future the availability of grid resources will play a large part in attracting research talent. The Extensible Terascale Facility, funded by the National Science Foundation, is one of the largest planned grid infrastructures. It will connect five U.S. sites and have the capability of processing 20 trillion operations per second.

Moreover, the network connecting the different facilities will speed information at 40 billion bits per second, or four times the speed expected for the Internet2 after that backbone is upgraded in 2003. North Carolina Supercomputing Center scientist Jack DaSilva says that many other scientists have not yet begun to think about the applications of grid computing in their fields, but expects they will find uses for the technology as it matures.

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