[ExI] Ranger, the most powerful supercomputing system in the world

[John Grigg]

Exciting times...

http://asunews.asu.edu/20080222_ranger

Ranger, the most powerful supercomputing system in the world and one in
which Arizona State University researchers played a key role in its
development and operation, was dedicated Feb. 22 in a ceremony at the
University of Texas-Austin. The $59 million computer project is led by
UT-Austin and funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Ranger ushers in the "Petascale Era" in high-performance computing. It is
the largest high performance computing resource on NSF's "TeraGrid," a
nationwide network of academic high performance computing centers that
provides scientists and researchers access to large-scale computing power
and resources. Ranger will provide more than 500 million processor hours of
computing time to the science community, performing the equivalent of more
than 200,000 years of computational work over its four-year lifetime.

ASU researchers have been working on innovative application development
strategies, data management technologies and training opportunities in the
project.

Ranger is designed to help scientists tackle many of the "grand challenges"
of science, from mapping the universe to comprehending the myriad cosmic
forces and environmental processes that affect the Earth, and to more fully
understanding the intricacies of human and plant biology, said Dan
Stanzione, director of the High Performance Computing Institute at Arizona
State University.

"Much of our role is as trainer and consultant for users of Ranger, helping
them to get the best science possible out of the system," added Stanzione,
an assistant professor in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. "We also
will be evaluating new software technologies that we can incorporate into
Ranger to make it an even better supercomputing system."

The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas-Austin is
home to Ranger. Others involved in the project include UT's Institute for
Computational and Engineering Sciences, Cornell University, Sun Microsystems
and Advanced Micro Devices.

The project's goal is to deploy and support world-class high-performance
systems with tremendous computing capacity to enhance leading U.S. research
programs. At 504 teraflops of peak performance, Ranger is up to 50,000 times
more powerful than today's PCs, and five times more capable than any
open-science computer available to the national science community. One
teraflop is equal to 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, a
measure of a high-performance computer's power.

At the computational level, Ranger offers more than six times the
performance of the previous largest system for open science research. Ranger
and other petascale systems to follow will be used to address many of
science's "grand challenges" including modeling and simulations of global
climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, new materials
and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, and drug design.

"Ranger is the first of the new 'Path to Petascale' systems that NSF
provides to open science," said Daniel Atkins, director of NSF's Office of
Cyberinfrastructure. "No longer used by a handful of elite researchers in a
few research communities on select problems, advanced computing has become
essential to the way science and engineering research and education are
accomplished."
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