On January 1, 2008, The University of Texas will flip the switch on “Ranger,” breathing life into the most powerful supercomputer ever built.
Ranger was engineered by Sun Microsystems, but the $29 million hardware bill was entirely bankrolled by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Though UT was able to skip out on that check, they will have to spend $1 million a year to power Ranger (yuk).
Besides having 62,976 CPU cores (your computer has 1 or 2), it has 1.7 petabytes of disk space. What does that mean? Let’s just say Google and eBay each manage about 2 petabytes of data for all of their services.
What’s cool about this supercomputer is that unlike its predecessors, Ranger “will be entirely open to the scientific community. Scientists nationwide will be able to conduct research on it at an unprecedented scale.” Hook ’em, scientists.
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