NSF Director Arden Bement, Jr. and OCI Director Dan Atkins pose at the SDSC Resource Provider stand. From left: SDSC Director Fran Berman, Atkins, Bement, Patricia Kovatch, Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, Mark Sheddon and Phil Andrews.

Dan Atkins' sentiment, expressed during his plenary talk at last week's TeraGrid '06 meeting in Indianapolis, described well the atmosphere at the national grid infrastructure's first public conference. More than 450 people from academia, government and industry attended TeraGrid '06 to share ideas, innovations and insight into using cyberinfrastructure to address the world's challenging computational problems.

Plenary talks from National Science Foundation Director Arden Bement, Jr., NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure Director Atkins and TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett discussed the history and future of cyberinfrastructure in general and the TeraGrid in particular, and how new technologies are advancing scientific research.

"TeraGrid participants are taking a clear leadership role in involving computing power that will enable researchers to do their work more swiftly, collaboratively and efficiently than ever before," noted Bement in his keynote speech.

Attendees also heard Donna Cox from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications speak on her work with data-driven visualization, and the University of Oklahoma's Kelvin Droegemeier discuss the potential of cyberinfrastructure to increase the accuracy of weather forecasting.

TeraGrid director Charlie Catlett introduces the new TeraGrid map. The National Center for Atmospheric Research was announced as the ninth TeraGrid Resource Provider during the conference.

Parallel sessions focused on science applications on the TeraGrid, research into grid computing technologies and tools, and demonstrations of both. More than 200 people delved more deeply into different aspects of the TeraGrid on the first day of the conference, when eight tutorials on subjects from developing Web services to visualization were available. One tutorial focused on the Science Gateway program, through which the TeraGrid hopes to reach a greatly expanded community of science researchers.

"We started with 10 Science Gateway partners, and now we have 22," said Catlett during his State of the TeraGrid Address. "This year our focus is on even more user input from the scientific community, and we plan to keep expanding the Science Gateways program."

The education and outreach sessions were also well attended, and included presentations on topics from cyberinfrastructure-enabled learning environments and curriculum maps to digital libraries and user portals.

"It is merely a half measure to produce new technologies without developing a workforce to use and maintain them," added Bement. "In the future cyberinfrastructure needs to be as ubiquitous as it is revolutionary."

Visit the TeraGrid '06 Web site for more information and links to streaming video of the plenary speakers, Science Impact sessions and selected tutorials.