Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/02/22/ranger_amd_sun_tacc/
Gawker - Texas's supercomputing Ranger
60,000 cores of justice
Posted in Channel, 22nd February 2008 21:29 GMT
We first met Ranger in Oct. of 2006. Back then, Sun Microsystems, AMD and the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) speculated that they might be on the way to producing the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Thanks to AMD's delays shipping a four-core Opteron chip, cabling issues and general InfiniBand woes the top dog dream failed to occur. Instead, Ranger's official unveiling took place this week with the supercomputer standing as the world's fastest "open" system. Fair enough.
Ranger exemplifies what can result from Sun's so-called Constellation designs. With the help of co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim and others, Sun has crafted servers, storage and especially networking gear that can scale - and how. For example, the Ranger system runs on 15,744 of AMD's quad-core "Barcelona" versions of Opteron. It also uses Sun's x4500 'sterver' (hybrid server and storage box) to reach 1.7 petabytes of data capacity. And then there's the Magnum switch, which offers up 3,456 ports of InfiniBand goodness and total bandwidth of 110Tb/s.
The system's peak performance comes in at 504 teraflops, which trails the IBM Blue Gene system sitting at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). The IBM system enjoyed an upgrade while TACC sorted out the Opteron issues, bringing it to 106,496 PowerPC-based nodes and a peak performance of 596 teraflops.
Grabbing the top slot may not seem like a big deal, but it is. IBM receives for a mountainous volume of extra press because of Blue Gene's status. Even more impressive, IBM has managed to maintain its kingly position for years, which is tough to do in the ever-upgrading world of supercomputers.
But where LLNL's machine ultimately falls under control of the US Department of Energy, Ranger makes it way to researchers of various stripes.
Built via a $59m award, Ranger will reside on the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, which pulls together numerous computing centers to provide researchers with lots of horsepower. In addition, the system arrived thanks to the efforts of TACC, the University of Texas's Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (ICES), Arizona State University and Cornell University.
"Ranger offers more than six times the performance of the previous largest system for open science research," the parties said.
And in perhaps the oddest calculation comparison of all time, they added, "The boost in performance offered by Ranger relative to the previously largest open science machine is comparable to reducing the flight time from New York to London to just one hour."
That's just fine, but how many gibbon months will this knock off deforestation?
A solid 90 per cent of Ranger power will go to the TeraGrid, while TACC will suck down ten per cent for its own good and for the good of research projects across the great state of Texas.
Sun and AMD, of course, receive their fair share of glory for putting Ranger together as well. But all is not perfect for AMD.
The company made a special effort to get those Opterons to TACC, meaning that it had to send in the buggy first batch of chips. A temporary fix for these chips does cause some performance degradation, which is not what you want in a supercomputer.
Sun's server chief John Fowler, however, has characterized the performance issues as minimal. Nonetheless, AMD will be digging into its own pockets to pay for an upgrade to fixed Opterons in the coming months, as we understand it. ®