Texas Advanced Computing Center

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is a research center for advanced computational science, engineering and technology.

TACC provides comprehensive advanced computing resources and support services to researchers in Texas and across the USA. TACC also conducts research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.

TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support users of these resources. Through the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid project, these resources and services are also made available to the national academic research community.

TACC collaborators include researchers in other UT Austin departments and centers, at Texas universities in the High Performance Computing Across Texas Consortium [ [http://www.hipcat.net HIPCAT Consortium] ] , and at other U.S. universities and government laboratories.

Projects

TACC research and development activities are supported by several federal programs, including:

*the NSF TeraGrid program
** Computational Chemistry Grid project
*the NSF Information Technology Research program
*the NSF National Middleware Initiative Testbed
*the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Office Programming Environment & Training program
*the Department of Energy Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program [ [http://www.scidac.org SCIDAC program] ]
*the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Information Power Grid program.

Ranger

In September 2006, the NSF granted TACC a $59 million award to purchase deploy a supercomputer system. The system, dubbed "Ranger", built in a partnership with Sun Microsystems, went into production on February 4, 2008. It entered the Top500 list in June 2008 as the fourth fastest computer over all.

Ranger is the first Sun Constellation System in production. It includes 62,976 processor cores (provided by 15,744 Opteron quad-core processors in 3,936 quad-socket Sun Blade server nodes) running the CentOS Linux distribution, and originally had peak performance of 504 teraflops, memory of 123 terabytes and disk storage of 1.73 petabytes. [cite web
url=http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/hpcsystems/#ranger
title=Sun Constellation Linux Cluster
publisher=Texas Advanced Computing Center
accessdate=2007-06-09] [cite web
url=http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20080303
title=The World's Largest Supercomputing Cloud
last=Schwartz|first=Jonathan
date=2008-03-03
accessdate=2007-06-09] It was upgraded to faster AMD Opteron processors in June 2008, with peak performance of 580 teraflops. [cite web
url=http://news.teragrid.org/view-item.php?item=3392
title=Ranger Processor Upgrade and Extended Maintenance
publisher=Texas Advanced Computing Center
date=2008-06-11
accessdate=2008-06-26]

References

External links

* [http://www.tacc.utexas.edu Texas Advanced Computing Center]
* [http://www.utexas.edu University of Texas]
* [http://teragrid.org TeraGrid project]