XSEDE created
The National Science Foundation funded a partnership of 17 institutions to create the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project for five years, at $121 million. XSEDE will be the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world.
Scientists and engineers use these resources and services—things like supercomputers, collections of data, and new tools—to propel scientific discovery and improve our lives. They are a crucial part of research in fields like earthquake engineering, materials science, medicine, epidemiology, genomics, astronomy, and biology.
XSEDE will replace and expand the TeraGrid project that started more than a decade ago. More than 10,000 scientists used the TeraGrid to complete thousands of research projects, at no cost to the scientists.
“This is much more than just the same old resources that TeraGrid offered,” XSEDE director John Towns said. “XSEDE will take the next step by lowering technological barriers to access and use. We are creating a distributed cyberinfrastructure in which researchers can establish private, secure environments that have all the resources, services, and collaboration support they need to be productive.”
Initially, XSEDE will support 16 supercomputers across the country. It also includes other specialized digital resources and services to complement these computers. These resources will be expanded throughout the lifetime of the project.
The XSEDE partnership includes: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, University of Tennessee Knoxville, University of Virginia, Shodor Education Foundation, Southeastern Universities Research Association, University of Chicago, University of California San Diego, Indiana University, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Purdue University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, University of California Berkeley, Rice University, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It is led by the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications.