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the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as the most powerful computer available for general research purposes.

Ranger is funded by a $59 million grant from the National Science Foundation, and 90 percent of Ranger’s time is dedicated to the TeraGrid, a nationwide network of academic high-performance computing (HPC) centers that provides scientists and researchers access to large-scale computing power and resources. The rest of Ranger’s time will be shared by research projects at Texas higher-education institutions and industrial partners.

A big part of the Ranger story is density. Never before has so much computational power been assembled in such a compact space. “We’re very interested in density, in trying to get as many processing cores into the smallest area possible,” comments Karl Schulz, Ph.D., associate director of high-performance computing at TACC.

Ranger sits in six rows of racks in a room just 54 feet by 38 feet in size, about the area of half a basketball court, and the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor helps make Ranger’s design possible. “In a mul-tichip module (MCM) design, there’s a lot of traffic between the package’s two cores. That can lead to slower performance and increased latency between the cores,” says AMD Business Development Manager Thomas Toles. “In a native quad-core system design, like that found with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, the cores can all talk to each other faster and there are discrete dedicated paths for the memory. It’s much more efficient.”

In that sense, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is key. “You must be able to get information from the memory to the processor so you can do some useful computing, and the AMD Opteron processor really excels at being able to crunch numbers,” says Schulz.

Given that this computer provides more than 10 times the raw processing power of typical university supercomputers, scientists are being invited to bring their toughest challenges to TACC.

“We’re going to provide a system that has no boundaries in terms of what users are used to,” says Schulz. As AMD CEO Hector Ruiz put it at Ranger’s launch event, “I believe that supercomputing is truly something that’s going to bring innovation back to America.” n

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