Maximum Power, Minimum Space

By Alex Handy

April 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
When it comes to large math problems, even the most complex equation is no match for the powerful desktops currently available to one and all. The days of setting a room-filling computer or grid on a single problem are quickly vanishing as those problems become scarcer and scarcer. Thus, when the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin first lit up its new Ranger super cluster, they filled its memory banks with something that’s a bit more than just a math equation.

Ranger is part of the TeraGrid, an America-spanning network of large computing clusters, which can be set upon any task a participating scientist sees fit. As most of these clusters offer at least a teraflop of processing power, those tasks tend to be of the simulation variety. But all that computing juice isn’t being used to look into our future: It’s being used to simulate the past. Ranger’s biggest jobs to date have mostly dealt with simulating the beginnings of our universe.

Suns Sparkle
As with any universal undertaking, Ranger began with a Sun: Sun Microsystems and AMD were the primary hardware providers for the system’s 3,000 blades. But even before that, Ranger began after the TACC team won a grant from the National Science Foundation in September of 2006, with Sun Microsystems. Ranger is no simple cluster, hacked together from the cheapest parts. The initial budget offered by the NSF for Ranger’s construction was US$30 million, plus any estimated maintenance costs expected in the first four years.

That budget ended up at a total of US$59 million. With a US$7 million per year operation cost, Ranger will cost almost as much to run for four years as its initial hardware costs.

But that’s not unusual, said Tommy Minyard, assistant director for Advanced Computing Systems at TACC. The money was coming from grants, said Minyard, so it was the least of his team’s worries. What did give his team pause, however, was the daunting task of bringing over 62,000 CPUs into a space of no more than 4,000 square feet.

Related Search Term(s): Sun Microsystems, TeraGrid

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