Ranger's Quantum Leap Forward
Ranger represents a dramatic advance for supercomputing. With Ranger's power, researchers, engineers, and scientists will be able to study the world in ways never before possible, transforming industry and society around the planet.
- Astronomy
- Education
- Oil, gas exploration, and the search for alternative energy
- Finance
- Manufacturing
- Life sciences and medicine
Watch the TACC Ranger Dedication Ceremony
"Without a doubt, Ranger is the most powerful general-purpose supercomputing system for research ever."
Jay Boisseau
Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center
University of Texas at Austin
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504 Teraflops Peak Performance (504 trillion floating point operations per second)
- The supercomputer contains 82 Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems racks
- Each rack holds 48 Sun Fire 6000 Blade Servers, for a total of 3,936
- Each blade has four quad-core AMD processors
- That makes a total of 15,744 AMD processors, with 62,976 cores!
What's Inside Ranger
The Sun Blade 6048 Modular System is blazingly fast, energy-efficient, and versatile enough to scale from a departmental cluster to petascale computing.
The system's ultra-dense unibody chassis saves about 500 lbs. per rack when compared with traditional chassis and rack combinations. It gives you 50 percent more compute power than its nearest competitor at HP and 71 percent more than IBM per rack. That means more throughput per square foot in tight datacenters, which translates into lower power and cooling costs versus competing modular systems.
Sun Blade 6048 Chassis Gallery
Because a Supercomputer Needs More Than Fast Processors
- Ranger contains 72 Sun Fire X4500 storage servers, each with 48 500GB drives, yielding 1.7 petabytes of raw storage capacity
- 125 terabytes (TB) of memory
- Long-term storage for retention and archiving is scalable to 3.1 petabytes online and 200 petabytes near-line.
- Ranger links two Sun Datacenter Switch 3456s, the world's fastest InfiniBand switch, with up to 110 terabits aggregate bandwidth
Linking it Together
Sun unites Ranger's powerful hardware with software that is robust enough to handle petascale computing.
- Sun Grid Engine provides workload management and dynamic provisioning of application workloads. Sun Grid Engine can manage a grid of up to ten thousand hosts, including the Ranger supercomputer and its large-scale simulations.
- The Lustre File System is a reliable open source file system that supports a variety of networks. This massively scalable object-based cluster is powerful enough for Ranger's needs, supporting tens of thousands of storage nodes, petabytes of data, and billions of files.
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Why TACC Picked Sun
Sun's commitment to high-performance computing (HPC) is the foundation for the project. TACC considered several vendors for the Ranger project, but Sun offered the best overall performance thanks to the Sun Constellation System's open petascale architecture, which tightly integrates Sun's exceptional compute, storage, and networking technology. This architecture reduces switching elements by a factor of 300, cabling by a factor of six, and system footprint by up to 20%. In a petascale deployment, these efficiencies shorten deployment times and yield huge savings in floor space and energy costs.
"We evaluated a lot of partners and a lot of vendors. Sun's offer far exceeded what any of the others offered."
Tom Minyard
Assistant Director, Advanced Computing Systems
Texas Advanced Computing Center
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Sun and High-Performance Computing
You don't need a supercomputer the size of Ranger to benefit from Sun's innovations in high-performance computing. Sun HPC solutions are:
Fast — Sun's commitment to innovation delivers world-record performance today and will for years to come
Scalable — Sun HPC solutions have room to grow as a project becomes more complex or your business expands
Open — Choice of OS, CPU, third-party applications, networking, interconnect fabrics, and more
Reliable — Sun's rock-solid hardware and Ranger's system redundancy nearly eliminates downtime
Simple — Sun Constellation Reference Designs are pre-packaged, thoroughly tested configurations that deliver faster time to market, more simulations in less time, and increased accuracy
Sun's HPC Advantage
Bjorn Andersson, Sun's director of HPC, discusses how you can take advantage of HPC trends with Sun technology.
Sun HPC in Action
Tokyo Institute of Technology
At Tokyo Tech, researchers rely on a Sun-built supercomputer based on Sun Fire servers to offer better predictions of catastrophic weather events such as tsunamis. The supercomputer there came online only two months after delivery, and researchers immediately began using it to study biology, medicine, and nuclear physics.
"The Sun Fire servers have performed marvelously without exhibiting any weaknesses."
Satoshi Matsuoka
Professor
Tokyo Institute of Technology
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Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies
Sun saved the day during the production of Barnyard, an animated movie featuring lavish backgrounds and highly furred and textured characters, when an existing image rendering farm proved to be underpowered. Dreading a four-week installation to upgrade the render farm, the Barnyard production team was thrilled when they realized all they had to do was plug in the Sun gear in order to get back into production.
"We had to change our render solution completely."
David Krause
Manager of Technology
Barnyard
"And that's where Sun Microsystems came to the rescue."
Aaron Parry
Executive Producer
Barnyard
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