2008-02-22 Faith Singer-Villalobos
AUSTIN, Texas -- Ranger, the most powerful supercomputing system in the world for open science research, today will be dedicated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. This first-of-its-kind system entered full production on Feb. 4.
Ranger’s deployment marks the beginning of the Petascale Era in high-performance computing (HPC) where systems will approach a thousand trillion floating point operations per second and manage a thousand trillion bytes of data.
Ranger is the largest HPC computing resource on the NSF TeraGrid, a nationwide network of academic HPC centers that provides scientists and researchers access to large-scale computing power and resources. Ranger will provide more than 500 million processor hours of computing time to the science community, performing more than 200,000 years of computational work over its four-year lifetime.
"Ranger is the first of the new 'Path to Petascale' systems that NSF provides to open science. It is out in front on the pathway to sustained petascale performance," said Daniel Atkins, director of the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. "This system and others to come underscore NSF's commitment to world-class, high-performance computing ensuring that the U.S. is a leader in computational science. No longer used by a handful of elite researchers in a few research communities on select problems, advanced computing has become essential to the way science and engineering research and education are accomplished."