The National Science Foundation (NSF) Thursday awarded a $53 million project designed to build the largest distributed scientific computing system in the world.

Dubbed the "TeraGrid," after the prefix "tera" a term used to mean one-trillion (e.g teraflop, terabyte), clusters of some 3,300 linked computers will be able to handle more than 13.6 trillion calculations per second and have the ability to store, access and share more than 450 trillion bytes of information.

The project, in effect creates a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF). The computers and servers will be housed at four facilities to address future complex scientific research.

"With this network, the nation's most advanced computers, instruments and data archives will be interconnected with greater capacity than we now have at the largest computer centers. Yet, the resources are in four locations, 2,000 miles apart," says Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance. "We effectively are improving on the Internet's elimination of distance and time barriers by making shared access to massive data - whether it's output from a radio telescope or scientific computer simulations - a routine endeavor."

Most of the work is expected to take place at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois as well as the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego; the Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago; and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Intel, IBM and Quest Communications say are committing to the project in the form of hardware, software and support.

The system will consist of clustered IBM servers running the Linux operating system, and will be connected by a Qwest high-speed optical network. Intel will supply the TeraGrid with key compilers, software, tools and engineering design, and tuning support services. The computers will be equipped with Intel's new Itanium chip.

Once the grid is up and running it will then be a resource for researchers to mutually access the system and collaborate using shared computing hardware, software and information.

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"Today's NSF award is a major show of support for Itanium technology," says Abhi Talwalkar, Intel vice president and assistant general manager, Enterprise Platforms Group. "All of us at Intel are proud of the role our products play in helping to advance the progress of scientific discovery."

The TeraGrid is expected to be up and running sometime in 2002.