TeraGrid's partner sites are connected by a dedicated optical network that zaps data around at ten to 30 gigabits per second.
One of the ways that TeraGrid is different from private-sector grids, says Catlett, is that it can run so many different platforms.
The Internet portal, called a science gateway, will be open to groups of users who apply to TeraGrid, and will function on a secure network.
That's a lot of new processor muscle, considering the TeraGrid already cranks out 60 teraflops of aggregated computing power per second, with three petabytes of rotating storage.
To put this in perspective, if the Earth's 6.4 billion people each did one calculation per second, we would be working at about one ten-thousandth of the speed of TeraGrid.
"We are going to extend the grid, bring in more computers, " said Charles Catlett , a researcher at the University of Chicago's Computation Institute and the director of the TeraGrid project.
Smarr is forging fiber links among computers at Urbana-Champaign, San Diego, CalTech and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to form a "TeraGrid, " capable of performing 13.5 trillion operations per second, as powerful as 13, 000 desktop computers.
TeraGrid, which is already the world's largest open computer, storage and networking system (exceeded only by the U.S. government's weapons-testing labs, which is "closed, " or isolated inside one institution), uses 16 different computer platforms and runs seven different operating systems.
The new money will open TeraGrid up to more researchers, in part by adding a Web-services dimension that will let institutions tap the computer without a direct connection to the eight major data centers, which are sprinkled from San Diego to Pittsburgh.
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