Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin 130
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."
Now We Know (Score:5, Funny)
I've heard this computer is so fast (Score:2, Funny)
Apostrophes (Score:3, Funny)
What was that? (Score:2, Funny)
What does a CPU and Britney Spears have in common? (Score:5, Funny)
Four Years? (Score:1, Funny)
Half-computer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The chickens come home to roost (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Funny)
(Score:0, Redundant)
Yeah, I suppose a cluster is redundant.
Can't they do better than nnnn-"flop"? (Score:2, Funny)
Gee, this computer is the BIGGEST flop generator of them all!
That's too bad.
NO! That's GOOD!
It is?
Yeah, lots and lots of flops per second - the more the better!
So the bigger the flops, the better?
Right!
Fewer flops is bad?
You got it!
And researchers want more money for more time with bigger flops?
Now you get it!
So they got $59 million for this humongous flop generator?
Yep!
Why don't they just burn the money if they want to generate a really big flop?
That wouldn't work - that wouldn't make any useful computing flops!
So this generates all these "useful computing flops"
Yes.
Was Vista one of their prototypes?
Global climate change, new energy sources... (Score:5, Funny)
With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!
Tm
Re:4 years is it's lifecycle? SKYNET?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:500M "Processor Hours"? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Dell has to be fuming (Score:5, Funny)
Do you really want to have a $59M machine dependent upon Dell customer support?
Re:are you serious? (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously though, this money comes from an NSF grant earmarked specifically for this project. We get these kind of complaints from other departments and especially undergrad editorials in the student newspaper. Unfortunately, the budget from the football team won't be used to renovate the social work buildings.
Re:I've heard this computer is so fast (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Apostrophes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I've heard this computer is so fast (Score:4, Funny)
Finally TUX RACER in FULL 3D GLORY !