Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin

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."

AMD

[milsoRgen]

I'm glad to see AMD based projects like this, as they have certainly took a hit in the HPC space [top500.org] as of late.

4 year lifespan

[DeftPunk79]

The 4 year lifespan in the /. article refers to the amount of time the award money covers for operations costs. So if it finds some others mean s of operation funds it could live longer... of course those funds will probably be from a private organization and the ranger would no longer be open for research.

Re:500M "Processor Hours"?

[Anonymous Coward]

...How is this different from a regular supercomputer? Supercomputers are already parallel - this just adds a second layer of parallelism. Competing supercomputers have always had different economy on a "processor hour", multicore CPUs is just one technique to increase the processing power of the machine.

And you could *TRY* to build a 15,744 single core machine and claim the same performance, but it would all fall apart very very quickly when someone asks "how many FLOPS?" (which is what computing power should be measured in, regardless of how many cores it has).

Dell has to be fuming

[fabu10u$]

In their backyard, and Sun gets the job instead. (Maybe this is why Dell has started offering AMD?)

actually...

[elite1789]

I was at TACC a few weeks ago, and the peak performance was around 519 teraflops.... Sadly, they also said the word on the street is that IBM wont take too kindly to the new king in town, and since TOP500 is biannually, everyone is biting their nails about blue-gene getting a quick upgrade in time to stay on top. Turns out the blue-gene systems are so scalable its quite easy to strap a few thousand new processors for a nice performance boost.

What happens after lifespan?

[HockeyPuck]

Ranger comprises 3,936 compute nodes in a Sun Blade(TM) 6048 Modular System with 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors, and Sun Fire(TM) x4500 servers providing 1.7 petabytes of storage.

Since TFA says this hardware will last only four years, what typically happens to these supercomputers built out of so called commodity hardware? Is sun going to donate/resell this gear? Or does it end up in the scrap heap? Surely, these Sun Blades are supposed to have a useful lifespan greater than four years. Sun could probably give these blades to every elementary school in all of Texas. Is the future of super computing aka disposable computing?

Re:What happens after lifespan?

[Albert Sandberg]

It's actually the best way to aquire the new AMD Opteron processor, just wait for 4 years and get in line.

It's *MUCH* faster than that

[mangu]

Here's the source code for an infinite loop:

int main(){
  int i;
  for (i = 1; i > 0; i++)
/* do nothing */ ;
  return 0;
}

It runs in my 2.4GHz single-CPU computer in five seconds.

Explanation: this affirmation that "a computer is so fast it runs an infinite loop in X seconds" is actually true. Integers overflow, if you increase the largest positive number you get a negative number. But of course, this program uses 32-bit integers, it would take four billion times longer running in 64 bits.