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February 29, 2008
TACC Embarks on the Path to Petascale
I was so privileged as to make the pilgrimage down to the J.J. Pickle Research Center at the University of Texas for the dedication ceremony of Ranger, TACC's latest behemoth supercomputer. The list of attendees was surprisingly quite diverse. Principle investigators from a host of various disciplines, HPC heavyweights from the petroleum industry and several other big names in HPC all made appearances. Dr. Dan Atkins, director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, was there to see what his $59 million bought the NSF. Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD, was there caressing what has become the largest single repository of quad-core Barcelona silicon in the world. One note of interest was Sun Microsystem's dedication to the event. Jonathan Schwartz, Scott McNealy, John Fowler and Andy Bechtolsheim [wearing his characteristic sandals] all made the trip to Austin. It was certainly a feat in itself to gather individuals of this magnitude in a common venue.
Despite the long list of industry heavyweights, all eyes seemed to be on Dr. Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Jay's attitude at the event was analogous to that of a new father. There wasn't a single moment when you couldn't find Jay smiling ear-to-ear over the triumphant arrival of his silicon child. Ranger will certainly require the care and feeding typical of a newborn child. The 3,936 Sun blade modules emit a near-deafening whirl of noise. The power distribution units command more floor space than many large HPC installations and lifting the bundles of InfiniBand cabling would make Arnold Schwarzenegger strain. Needless to say, I was a kid in a candy store.
Much of the content delivered during the ceremony was directed toward the real meaning of "open science computing." Specifically, everyone discussed the impact of Ranger standing as the largest system in the world built for open science. I believe Dr. Atkins said it best. Ranger will be dedicated toward "finding knowledge needles in enormous data haystacks." How will they do so? I suggest we look at the numbers.
The Ranger system allocations will be split three ways. 90 percent of the allocations are headed for the TeraGrid. 5 percent are reserved for UT researchers and 5 percent are reserved for TACC's STAR program. This translates to ~56,678 cores dedicated to TeraGrid-allocated research projects. As such, 1.3 million CPU hours per day are directed toward open scientific research. TACC and the TeraGrid already have more than 500 users with allocations totaling over 100 million hours for the first quarter of operation. Those involved fully expect to allocate all 125 million hours of TeraGrid use for the second quarter of production. Over its total lifespan, Ranger will deliver more than 200,000 years of computational capability.
Ranger is most certainly the triumphant result of a successful partnership between vendor and end user. As we embark upon the age of petascale computing, it is imperative that vendors and end user organizations continue to form meaningful relationships in order to ease the pain from constructing and operating systems at such scale. I congratulate TACC, AMD and Sun Microsystems for their tireless efforts to provide such a large resource dedicated to facilitating open scientific research.
For more information on TACC and Ranger, point your browser to www.tacc.utexas.edu.
About the Author
John Leidel is a senior HPC architect and technical lead at a federal supercomputing laboratory and a chronic HPC geek. Having started his career as a classical software engineer, he participates in several open source projects centered on large enterprise computing/HPC environments. His recent interests include general purpose offload computing [FPGA/GPU/etc] in beowulf clusters. When he's not writing for insideHPC.com or slinging code for various open source pursuits, you can find him spending time with his family or whittling away at homemade briar pipes.
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