In 2005's first round of allocating supercomputing time, the first of four for the year, almost 570 million normalized units (NUs) were meted out on supercomputing systems around the country that are supported by the National Science Foundation.
This is the most ever allocated in a single round. It represents more than three-quarters of the total NUs allocated in 2004's four allocation rounds combined. More than 270 million NUs were allocated on systems supported by the NSF's Extended Terascale Facility or TeraGrid.
More than 310 million units were made available on systems at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, with 120 million of those on systems supported by the TeraGrid program.
The Large and Medium Resource Allocation Committees (LRAC and MRAC) peer review proposals for time on these systems. They expect to award nearly 1.5 billion units over the course of 2005.
Scientists and engineers at research institutions throughout the U.S. apply for allocations on these high-performance systems to conduct research that would not be possible on smaller local computing systems or desktop computers.
As in past years, the allocation of supercomputing time shows the breadth of scientific and engineering fields represented by users. In 2004 (the last year for which compiled data is available) at NCSA, for example, 25 percent of the allocated NUs went to biology users, 20 percent to physics, 15 percent to chemistry, 13 percent to engineering, and 7 percent to astronomy. More than 1,300 users at 209 institutions in 43 states used NCSA's systems last year.
A normalized unit is the equivalent of one hour of computing time on a single processor of a Cray X-MP supercomputer. Based on the LINPACK benchmark, it is used by the NSF programs as the standard measure for comparing time allocated on multiple systems.