Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin

SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."

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The chickens come home to roost

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Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."

ATTENTION RESEARCHERS:

Processing time on the new Ranger supercomputer is limited, and will be allocated to projects according to merit. Projects that aim to reinforce the current Doctrine naturally have greater merit. Projects that challenge the Doctrine, or that aim to refute it, will be placed in the secondary queue, and will receive an allocation of resources if and when the primary queue is empty.

In answer to the obvious objection: The University of Texas is a Public institution, and the Ranger supercomputer was built with Public funds, and so it is only appropriate that Ranger's resource allocation mirrors Public opinion. The Public does not like cognitive dissonance, and neither does the board of Regents.