Sun Microsystems has announced that the company is building the world’s largest supercomputer named Ranger.

Ranger will house 62,976 CPU cores, 125 terabytes of main memory, 1.7 petabytes of disk space and a whooping 504 teraflops of performance.
The computer will be hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The company also expects that the computer will go online on the first day of 2008.

Ranger will also outshine the reigning boss of supercomputers that has been developed by IBM and is named BlueGene. BlueGene has a performance of just 327 teraflops.

Talking about Ranger, it will house 16,744 quad-core AMD Opteron processors and will consume three megawatts of raw power. This will cost the University a million dollars per year. Sun also stated that the machine’s production timeline is dependent on when AMD is able to crank out the chips which will be used in the computer.

When this new supercomputer comes online, it will help scientists conduct researches on an unbelievable speed and an unprecedented scale. The machine which will be six to seven times larger than any of the existing systems will be used in researches in the field of astrophysics, genomics, nanotechnology and meteorology.

Ranger can also be taken as a thing which will be much common in future. If the chip size goes on decreasing as fast as it is now and the cost of hardware also keeps falling then in the next five to seven years, such machines will be common and better machines would have taken their place.

But for now Ranger is the world’s biggest computer, lets see as to who comes with a better machine...!

Via: Wired80158