Scientists Plan New Supercomputer System

September 3, 2003

CHICAGO (AP) - Scientists at two Chicago-area national laboratories, along with colleagues from around the world, are working to build a supercomputer system that eventually would make accessible massive amounts of information currently off limits to the average computer user.

The so-called international data grid would be an even greater resource than the World Wide Web, linking computers in a new way to harness most of the world's number-crunching capacity along with enormous amounts of information now unavailable to most people.

``It's a democratization of science,'' said Lothar Bauerdick, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia. ``The resources will be there and you can tap into them. It gives equal opportunities to everyone to become part of science and part of the discoveries.

``It started as a need in science but offers a transforming technology for society.''

Essentially, the grid will do on a more massive scale what the Web did for physicists after it was launched in 1991 - enable scientists to navigate data gridlock through a network of interconnected info highways.

``The goal is to accelerate the handling of the dramatic increase in the amount of data scientists have to deal with,'' said Ian Foster, a math and computer science expert at the Lemont-based Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago.

``In the face of this data explosion the capability of an individual scientist to actually ask and get answers to interesting questions has become challenging,'' said Foster, considered the father of the data grid. ``The data grid will allow them to get answers by harnessing large numbers of computing and storage resources to perform their computations.''

The feasibility of the grid as a vehicle for on-demand access to computing and data integration has been demonstrated through trial runs between Fermilab and other centers in the United States and Europe.

``The vision of the grid is that it would provide computational power on tap,'' said Vicky White, chief of Fermilab's computer division. ``If someone wanted to run through a simulation for whatever purpose, <http://member.compuserve.com/wrap/linker.jsp?floc=&ref=http://websearch.cs.com/cs/cs_results.adp?source=csstorysearch&query=Betting>betting on horses, playing the stock market or doing high-energy physics in Calcutta, they would get access to those services instead of having to go down and buy their own supercomputer.''

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