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The TeraGrid Community Steps Up to Help Japan in Crisis

Colors in this image depict peak wave heights of the tsunami that hit Japan on Friday, March 11.

The magnitude-8.9 quake that struck Japan at 2:46 p.m. local time on Friday, March 11, spawned coast-slamming tsunamis that crossed the Pacific in less than 21 hours. The tsunami first reached a monitoring buoy just minutes after the quake occurred, and soon thereafter scientists released a forecast of wave heights and arrival times. Colors in this image depict peak wave heights. Near the undersea source of the temblor, about 375 kilometers north-northeast of Tokyo, and southeast of that epicenter, where much of the quakes energy was focused, the height of the tsunami wave likely exceeded 2.5 meters (depicted in black). But across most of the Pacific, the open-ocean height of the waves, which race across the sea at jetliner speeds, probably remained less than 20 centimeters (yellow and orange).

Credit: NOAA


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Map of the United States showing the TeraGrid network.

TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research combining leadership class resources at 11 partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource.

Using high-performance network connections, TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. Currently, TeraGrid resources include more than 2.5 petaflops of computing capability and more than 50 petabytes of online and archival data storage, with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Researchers can also access more than 100 discipline-specific databases.

TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the Resource Provider sites: Indiana University, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, and University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Credit: NSF


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