TeraGrid was coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the resource provider sites in the United States.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a solicitation asking for a "distributed terascale facility" from program director Richard L.

In August 2005, NSF's newly created office of cyberinfrastructure extended support for another five years with a $150 million set of awards.

It included $48 million for coordination and user support to the Grid Infrastructure Group at the University of Chicago led by Charlie Catlett.

[4] In May 2007, TeraGrid integrated resources included more than 250 teraflops of computing capability and more than 30 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks.

CTSS also provides integrative functions such as single-signon, remote job submission, workflow support, data movement tools, etc.

Academic researchers in the United States can obtain exploratory, or development allocations (roughly, in "CPU hours") based on an abstract describing the work to be done.

As of July 2006 the scientific profile of TeraGrid allocations and usage was: Each of these discipline categories correspond to a specific program area of the National Science Foundation.

Starting in 2006, TeraGrid provided application-specific services to Science Gateway partners, who serve (generally via a web portal) discipline-specific scientific and education communities.