Last week I joined a few colleagues at work on a field trip to the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin.

A few of the highlights of our tour:

• Ranger – a supercomputer which was ranked fourth fastest in the world in June 2008.  Ranger accurately predicted the path of Hurricane Ike 3 days before it hit Houston in 2008.

• Visualization Laboratory – Stallion, a 307 megapixel tiled-display system.  They’ve taken 23 Dell gaming machines and combined them with a grid of 75 Dell 30 inch flat panels to produce an amazing unified screen.  Also on display was a 3D HDTV demo.

• Fluid Immersion Cooling System – Apparently it’s more cost effective to cool servers with mineral oil than it is with conventional airflow (fans).  TACC had a complete rack of servers submerged in mineral oil.  It was quite strange to see computers, immersed in liquid, turned on with lights blinking.  The system is made by Green Revolution Cooling.

Fluid Immersion Cooling System (by Green Revolution Cooling)

TAAC Visualization Laboratory