The World's Largest Supercomputing Cloud

I had no idea the Hubble telescope could see only 12 billion years into the past. Frankly, I'd never really thought about telescopes looking into the past until Dr. Michael Norman, a researcher from UCSD gave me a basic education in astronomy - and explained the Hubble looks at celestial bodies whose light is just now reaching us. But it can "only" see 12 billion years into the past - and that was a veil he'd like to pierce. (I asked him what he did for a living, he said, "I simulate the universe." Trump that job description.) The question he was interested in answering was, "what about the prior 1.7 billion years?" The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, and given the Hubble's limits, he was using the world's largest supercomputer, the Ranger platform at the University of Texas at Austin's TACC (Texas Advanced Computer Center) to simulate the prior 1.7 billion years. (He later confided he was most interested in the prior 1.5 billion years, the first 200-300 million were characterized by lots of hydrogen fog, yet to clump into the wells that enable stars to be born.) I was asked to give a keynote to celebrate Ranger's opening, and this was only one example of the flood of basic research and science that will now be performed on the world's largest open computing platform. Open? The facility was funded by the National Science Foundation, and is committed to providing large scale supercomputing as a ser...

Date: March, 03 2008
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/lone_ranger

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