Paper Critique by SAMPATH AKKINENI
GRIDS, THE TERAGRID, AND BEYOND
By Daniel A. Reed
( IEEE Computer Society, Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2003 )
Due: 19th November 2003
Summary
TeraGrid or Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) is a massive research computing project funded by
National Science Foundation. TeraGrid project includes combining five large computing and data
management facilities to create a distributed information technology infrastructure to support
collaborative computational science. Worldwide scientific infrastructure can be created by
combining numerous resources all over the world. TeraGrid is a virtual supercomputer built from
individual clusters linked by very high speed cross-country networks.
The following partners are involved in the TeraGrid project
 National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois
 San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California
 Argonne National Laboratory, Mathematics and Computer Science Division
 California Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Computing Research
 Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
The TeraGrid is being constructed as a persistent infrastructure within which resources are
individually managed at individual sites, but they provide some agreed upon grid services. TeraGrid
architecture contains Linux based HPC clusters powered by Intel’s 64-bit Itanium2 processors and
other open source software. TeraGrid components will be integrated using Linux and grid
middleware Globus toolkit which contains software for intracluster interactions. Globus toolkit will
also help with tasks like discovering what resources are available on the grid and deciding what jobs
have permissions to use them.
After completion, this TeraGrid project will include more then 16 Tflops of Linux cluster computing
distributed across the facilities that can manage and store 800 Tbytes of data. As part of this
TeraGrid project, researchers are working on projects like gravitational wave detection, earthquake
simulation, digital sky surveys and system biology etc. Other research proposals are being accepted
from researches and solutions for those problems will be found as part of this TeraGrid project.
Strengths
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TeraGrid will help researchers solve complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of
conventional supercomputers.
Reduce or eliminate the barriers of time and space that make it difficult for distributed
research groups to collaborate
Complex real world problems can be solved with the availability of high speed
computational power and ability to analyze huge amounts of data
Allows people to tap into computing power, data resources and collaboration tools based on
their needs no matter where those tools or resources are located
Enables data and resource sharing among collaborating groups
Weaknesses
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Privacy and security are major concerns as there is huge amount of data and resource
sharing among the participants
TeraGrid architecture introduces multiple points of failure as any computing facility can fail
any time
Interesting Points
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The scale of TeraGrid is unprecedented in the history of computing. Success of TeraGrid
will be measured by how well it functions, how faster it is in comparison with the existing
traditional computing environments
Scalability and extensibility are critical factors for the success of TeraGrid project.
Information exchange protocols and data formats need to be defined and implemented at
individual facilities
Critical Questions
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Is the TeraGrid interoperable? Is it possible to join the systems running on different
operating systems / languages to form a distributed computing environment?
How simple/complex is it to add other computer facilities and make the TeraGrid scalable?
How safe / vulnerable is the TeraGrid from internet attacks?
Are there any benchmarks against which the grid’s performance will be measured?
How can data integrity be maintained when huge amounts of data is shared and exchanged
between the facilities?