Further Findings

In a world in which small computing devices such as the iPad and its cousins get a lot of attention and what they’re used for is getting smaller (I’ve used more than 140 characters already), it’s good to know there is still room for Big Iron.

Of course, big problems—such as astronomy, energy, biosciences, geosciences and climate—need a big computer with a lot of processing power.

That’s what we’re talking about with the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Some Ranger numbers:

• 15,744 quad-core AMD OpteronTM processors

• 579.4 teraflops (flops is floating point operations per second and is a measure of how fast the computer processes information)

• 123 terabytes of total memory

Ranger marks its second anniversary on Feb. 4, 2010 and its users have kept it busy.

More numbers:

2,863 users

981 research projects

1,089,075 jobs

754,873,713.8 hours of processing time

97 percent uptime

“It’s arguably the most productive supercomputer in history in term of the number of people it’s supported and the number of jobs it’s supported,” says Jay Boisseau, TACC’s director.

One more number:

$59 million—The National Science Foundation grant for Ranger and four years of operation.