Ranger flexes its muscles by simulating the "rising temperature plume within the Earth’s mantle." By Rhea Group (Carsten Burstedde, Omar Ghattas, Georg Stadler, Tiankai Tu, Lucas Wilcox), in collaboration with George Biros (Penn), Michael Gurnis (Caltech), and Shijie Zhong (Colorado)

At the beginning of this month, the world's most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research officially went online at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin.

Dubbed "Ranger," the high performance computing (HPC) system consists of an astounding 62,976 microprocessor cores -- put into perspective, the notebook or desktop you're using to read this has one or two at most. It's roughly 50,000 times more powerful than the average home computer.

"Ranger is so much more powerful than anything that’s come before it for open science research," said Jay Boisseau, director of TACC, in UT's feature story. "It will be the first time researchers in many disciplines will be able to conduct simulations they have been planning in some cases for many years."

Open-science computing means that Ranger's time will be partitioned and distributed across various research projects. Some examples that Boisseau lists off include weather prediction and climate modeling, drug design, materials science, and cosmological calculations (the "big bang").

"Someone’s going to get to run a landmark case, and then they’re going to look at the output and see if they can do better," said Karl Schulz, TACC assistant director and chief scientist on Ranger. "That’s going to lead to breakthrough science because it’s the first time that researchers will be able to run at such a large scale and be able to do it with frequency."