The TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) Ranger supercomputer, which as the first NSF “Path to Petascale” system makes global journey to Africa. The student HPC team from the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town, South Africa recently won their second competition at ISC14 so we believe Ranger is in good hands and will continue to deliver quality science. “Ranger was the first supercomputer in open science to approach the petascale mark,” said Happy Sithole (pronounced ‘see-toll-yah’), the CHPC Director said, “Now, it is starting projects that are important in building high performance computing in Africa.” We expect CHPC will run some serious SKA telescope number crunching on this hardware. The SKA telescopes will be co-located in Africa and in Australia.
Happy Sithole Director, Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC)
The TACC Ranger delivered quality results during its five year ride in the US. For example, we demonstrated near-linear scaling to 60,000 processing cores on our deep-learning and numerical optimization framework that can be downloaded at https://github.com/rmfarber.
More information on our framework can be found on TechEnablement such as our 13 PF/s result and in additional online tutorials.
As a first user of Ranger, I was inspired to write my article “People Make Petaflop Computing Possible“.
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