Intel today announced that its Itanium family of processors will be used to build a distributed scientific computing system expected to be the largest of its kind in the world. The computing system, dubbed the "TeraGrid," is part of a $53 million award by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to four facilities to address complex scientific research by creating a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF). The TeraGrid will link computers powered by more than 3,300 Intel Itanium family processors. It will be capable of more than 13.6 trillion calculations per second (13.6 teraflops) and have the ability to store, access and share more than 450 trillion bytes of information. The TeraGrid will be accessible to researchers across the United States so that they can more quickly analyze, simulate and help solve some of the most complex scientific problems. Examples of research areas include molecular modeling for disease detection, cures and drug discovery, automobile crash simulations, research on alternative energy sources and climate and atmospheric simulations for more accurate weather predictions.