From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Fri Aug 10 2001 - 01:10:26 MDT
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010809/tc/tech_supercomputer_dc_1.html
<<By Duncan Martell
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The National Science Foundation (<A
HREF="http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/searc
h/news?p=%22National%20Science%20Foundation%22&c=&n=20&yn=c&c=news&cs=nw">news
</A> - <A
HREF="http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search
?p=National%20Science%20Foundation&cs=nw">web
sites</A>)said it will spend $53 million to build a massive computing grid
that will be the most powerful of its kind ever completed and could lead to
ground-breaking research that would have otherwise taken years, if not
decades, to complete.
Called the Distributed Terascale Facility, or DTF, it will be used by four
U.S. research centers for research in areas including molecular modeling for
detecting diseases, cures and drug discovery, research on alternative energy
sources, climateand atmospheric simulations, among others.
The current grid, which is the latest example of distributed computing that
is becoming increasing popular, will be able to process 13.6 trillion
calculations per second and will boast some 600 terabytes of data storage,
the equivalent of 146 million full-length novels. To put that computational
power in perspective, it would take one person with a calculator about 10
million years to tabulate the number ofcalculations the proposed grid could
in a single second.
``All these (scientific) instruments are producing enormous amounts of
scientific data and the challenge is mining these data to get some scientific
insights,'' said Daniel Reed, director for the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign on a conference call. ``This will transform, we believe, the
way science and engineering research is done.......">>
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