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Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin

Posted by kdawson on from the one-teraflop-per-researcher dept.

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."

7 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. And? by Junta · · Score: 4, Informative

    Both Opteron and Phenom were at the same B2 stepping, complete with the same L3 errata, despite the different packaging. That's why you haven't seen a Tier one vendor touch the Opterons with a 10 foot poll for a generally available product. You can bet your ass this is the reason AMD released the kernel patch so 'some customer' could proceed with a Linux Opteron deployment with B2 parts without the performance penalty nor risk of the L3 errata.

    This deployment is probably where AMD focused a firesale of B2 parts, since it's nice and well controlled.

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  2. Re:Is it ground shaking? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    There already is a faster computer. Ranger's peak is over 90 TF slower than BG/L at LLNL so unless there are some amazing efficiency breakthroughs (doubtful), it isn't going to be number one in June. That, of course, doesn't mean BG/L will still be number one either.

  3. Re:The one advantage they may enjoy.. by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Informative

    Couldn't see details, but this may use Sun's hypertransport switch as an interconnect. Sun doesn't make a Hypertransport switch and Ranger uses Infiniband just like other high-end x86 clusters.
  4. Queue the: But Does it run linux? by dustwun · · Score: 2, Informative

    And the answer is apparently yes. According to techtarget.com It'll be running CentOS just like slashdot does.

  5. IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR kdawson AND SethJohnson! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    It's peak processing power

    "Its".

  6. Re:Newspeak by Plaid+Phantom · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, and probably not.

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  7. Re:Global climate change, new energy sources... by adrianmonk · · Score: 2, Informative

    With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it,

    Luckily, UT has its own power plant.