We got word today that the Texas Advanced Computing Center has officially unveiled "Ranger", the world's largest general-purpose supercomputer.
"Ranger is funded by the U.S.
Government's National
Science Foundation (NSF) as part of a multi-track effort to
improve
the computing capability available to scientists. Developed by Sun in
conjunction with TACC, it is the most powerful computing cluster
used for open science research in the world -- capable of an
astonishing 504
trillion floating point operations per second." Sweeeet.
As I was reading about this, one thing that I noticed is that Ranger is based on the Lustre File System. All I really have to say is, who comes up with this stuff? Well okay, Lustre came up with it, but really... a node/object-based cluster system with capacity for billions of files with such astonishing reliability... HPC has come so far. The scalability potential here is crazy; I just need a personal server so I can play with stuff like this.
Note that there are already 500+ projects at work on Ranger already, and more are being added all the time. It's "optimized for science", so scientists: have at it.
