Why Universities Need a New Supercomputer Network

By linking some 1,400 processors at five universities, Indiana University intends to create a virtual supercomputer in the form of a network called FutureGrid. The project just garnered $10.1-million dollars in grant support from the National Science Foundation. But just why do universities need a new network when current ones, like TeraGrid, are still running? Geoffrey C. Fox, a professor of informatics at Indiana and director of FutureGrid, says in an interview on the blog Next Big Future that TeraGrid is a current workhorse, providing computing for current projects. But FutureGrid is supposed to develop new ways of doing things with more advanced technology, something that an active network with daily responsibilities to projects and users cannot do. FutureGrid will create software to facilitate cloud computing, so individual institutions will not have to build their own networks and powerful computers and can instead use a distributed network, or cloud, to handle huge computing tasks.