HPCwire

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Industry >> Academia & Research

Ranger Surpasses 1.1M Jobs in Less Than 2 Years


AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 11 -- The Ranger supercomputer, one of the most powerful systems in the world for open science research, has run about 1.1 million jobs in under two years.

When it entered full production on Feb. 4, 2008, this first-of-its-kind system marked the beginning of the Petascale Era in high-performance computing (HPC) where systems now approach a thousand trillion operations per second and manage a thousand trillion bytes of data.

"Ranger has already enabled hundreds of research projects and thousands of users to do very large-scale computational science in diverse domains," said Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). "We're very proud of the tremendous impact it has had on open science, and the impact is growing as it matures and more researcher applications are optimized to use its tremendous capabilities."

Bill Barth, director of TACC's HPC group, said, "The demand for time on Ranger has been very high and instrumental to making TeraGrid the nation's largest resource for open science computational research. The system has run more than 600 million central processing unit hours so far."

As for the user who ran the millionth job, Barth said it was a small post-processing job (16 processors) completed by Dr. Yonghui Weng, research associate, in Professor Fuqing Zhang's hurricane research group at the Pennsylvania State University Department of Meteorology.

"Researchers need to perform a variety of tasks on Ranger and they are all important to the research process," Barth said. " In addition, we have different types of researchers -- ones who are interested in running large single-simulation problems, and ones who are interested in running thousands or millions of really small problems. Our job is to support science at whatever scale."

Weng's research explores the potential of on-demand HPC to support hurricane forecast operations and to evaluate high-resolution ensembles to achieve Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) goals for the development and implementation of the next-generation hurricane forecast system.

Weng said he has been using Ranger consistently since July 2008 to produce improvements in hurricane forecast accuracy. Zhang's hurricane research group at Pennsylvania State is sponsored by grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration HFIP project.

"During the hurricane season from July to October, I run an operational hurricane ensemble data assimilation system twice per day, and my team runs an operational deterministic forecast system at the same frequency," Weng said. "In addition to the operational jobs during hurricane season, we use Ranger for sensitivity experiments, model development, and exploration of dynamics and predictability of hurricanes."

To illustrate the variety of ways one researcher can use a system like Ranger, Weng said he ran a cloud-scale ensemble analysis and prediction experiment that used 23,808 processors, and a deterministic forecast job that used 8,192 processors in real-time during Hurricane Ike.

"The system is wonderful and I'm impressed with the TACC support staff which make our jobs run so efficiently," Weng said.
"During the first several months of large-scale system deployment, every tweak is important," Barth said. "As time goes on the system settles out and begins to operate as a well-oiled machine. It's still many people's full-time jobs to keep Ranger running, but at the same time we can start to think about deploying new systems."

The Ranger supercomputer is funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure "Path to Petascale" program. The system is a collaboration among the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES), Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Arizona State University, and Cornell University. The Ranger supercomputer is a key system of the NSF TeraGrid, a nationwide network of academic HPC centers, sponsored by the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which provides scientists and researchers access to large-scale computing, networking, data-analysis and visualization resources and expertise.

-----

Source: Texas Advanced Computing Center


HPCwire on Twitter

Article Tools

  • Print This Page
  • Bookmark This Article

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)


Subscribe

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.  

HPC in the Cloud Part 2
People to Watch 2010


Feature Articles

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

The Week in Review

Cray and Microsoft Research partner on cloud computing project; IBM donates a POWER7-based supercomputer to Rice University; and the Kavli Foundation hosts a dialogue on the convergence of nanoscience and neuroscience. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html

SC09 HPC in the Cloud

Newsletters

Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.






HPC Job Bank


Featured Events

HPC User Forum DICE
2010 High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets
Cloud Computing Expo
Cloud Slam
ESC
DEISA PRACE Symposium