Austin (TX) - The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin is now running the world's most powerful supercomputing system for open science research. Ranger is expected 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.
The new supercomputer went live already on February 4 (about one month later than originally planned), but is made official by the TACC and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Friday. Ranger achieves a peak performance of 504 TFlops, which makes the world's second most capable supercomputer, after system is after IBM's 596 TFlops BlueGene/L, which is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Ranger will be joining NSF's Teragrid and is expected to ring in the age of Petaflop computing. A performance of 1 PFlops translates into one thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
"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, in a prepared statement.
