Ranger

“Ranger” is the largest computing system in the world for open science research. As the first of the new NSF Track2 HPC acquisitions, this system provides unprecedented computational capabilities to the national research community and ushers in the petascale science era. Ranger will enable breakthrough science that has never before been possible, and will provide groundbreaking opportunities in computational science & technology research – from parallel algorithms to fault tolerance, from scalable visualization to nextgeneration programming languages.

Ranger went into production on February 4, 2008 using Linux (based on a CentOS distribution). The system components are connected via a full-CLOS InfiniBand interconnect. Eighty-two compute racks house the quad-socket compute infrastructure, with additional racks housing login, I/O, and general management hardware. Compute nodes are provisioned using local storage. Global, high-speed file systems will be provided, using the Lustre file system, running across 72 I/O servers. Users will interact with the system via four dedicated login servers, and a suite of eight high-speed data servers. Resource management for job scheduling will be provided with Sun Grid Engine (SGE).