Tic, TACC, go Go GO!

We at Sun are very proud the Texas Advanced Computing Center‘s 504 TeraFLOP Ranger supercomputer is now online! Described as the largest computer in the world for open scientific research, Ranger is the first deployment of Sun’s Constellation system architecture, which combines ultra-dense blade servers with our 3456-port InfiniBand switch (two are used at TACC) to create one, huge cluster supercomputer. Ranger has almost 63000 CPU cores, over 120 TeraBytes of memory, and almost two PetaBytes of storage. And 504 TeraFLOPs of computing power.

Sun built the system, so we revel in the specs, but the real story is how the system is going to be used for science research. TACC has a nice article, titled Powering Discoveries, that describes Ranger’s mission. I recommend it to any Sun employee interested in understanding how our technologies are helping scientists solve some truly difficult and important problems.