URBANA — A new $121 million project led by the University of Illinois will help researchers collaborate in a secure environment, while focusing on their work rather than the technology behind it.

The National Science Foundation is providing the funding over five years — with an option to renew for another five— so that a powerful but more cumbersome knowledge grid, TeraGrid, can be replaced with a new, seamless one.

John Towns of the UI's National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the project leader and principal investigator for the partnership of 17 institutions in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment.

Shortened to XSEDE, it promises to be "the most advanced, powerful and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world."

Towns, who was also a leader in the TeraGrid project, said the older project, started more than a decade ago, helped thousands of scientists to complete thousands of research projects, at no cost to the scientists.

XSEDE can help even more scientists, he said, by removing obstacles inherent to using different technologies.

"By its nature, TeraGrid focused on folks capable of using very high-end and advanced systems," Towns said.

Instead of focusing on technology, XSEDE focuses on the researchers themselves, the project director said.

Everything will be multiplatform and more transparent to use in XSEDE, Towns said, helping researchers who don't have all the latest devices and software a supercomputing center does.

In his example, three research groups are collaborating on a project.

Two of them have outstanding clusters of technology, and the third has a fantastic database to share with them. XSEDE will allow them all to work at the same level (and in security) to create a virtual lab.

Multiple computers connected by high-speed network mean that data don't have to be moved from site to site, or worry about which cluster is busy, Towns said.

"This will really enhance the productivity of researchers," he said.

"Over the last few years (and since TeraGrid) there have been a variety of efforts in remote and integrated access, a lot of very interesting things. Researchers will spend a lot less time messing around with 'where's my data and what resources do I have access to.'"

As with TeraGrid, the collaborative computing will help with large simulations, such as weather forecasting, manipulation of data and in scientific imaging.

They are useful in fields like earthquake engineering, materials science, medicine, epidemiology, genomics, astronomy and biology.

XSEDE will lower many technological barriers to access and use, Towns said, and offer outreach to new communities that haven't traditionally used such digital services.

There are 16 supercomputers in XSEDE.

The partnership includes the UI, Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, University of Virginia, Shodor Education Foundation, Southeastern Universities Research Association, University of Chicago, University of California at San Diego, Indiana University, Jlich Supercomputing Centre, Purdue University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, University of California at Berkeley, Rice University, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.