Thursday June 28, 2007

As they say, things are just bigger in Texas.

On Monday, several members of the staff from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) joined the HPC Consortium meeting in Dresden by remote link. The audio was unfortunately not very good, but we managed to hear most of what was said. Speakers were Jay Boisseau (TACC Director) and (I believe) Tommy Minyard (Assistant Director). If there was a third speaker, I apologize--as I said, the audio was not good.

Ranger will be a 504 TFLOPs system, built using the Sun Constellation System architecture with two ultra-dense switches and almost 4000 Sun four-socket, quad-core, nodes using close to 16000 AMD Barcelona processors. With 2GB of memory per core, there will be over a hundred Terabytes of memory total in the system along with 72 Sun "Thumper" storage systems with a total of 1.7 PBytes of raw storage. The InfiniBand interconnect is a 7-stage, non-blocking Clos network with latencies and bandwidths of approximately, 2.3us and 950 Mbytes/sec, respectively.

Ranger will run Linux and the OpenFabrics InfiniBand stack. It will use Lustre as its cluster file system and will run two MPI libraries: MVAPICH and Open MPI (the code base on which Sun's MPI for Solaris is based.) TACC will use multiple compiler suites, including Sun Studio. Sun Grid Engine will be used as Ranger's distributed resource management system.