Wrangler Supercomputer Speeds through Big Data

Scientists and engineers at TACC have created a new kind of supercomputer to handle big data. Featured on the podcast is Niall Gaffney, Director of Data Intensive Computing at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Gaffney leads efforts at TACC to bring online a new data-intensive supercomputing system called Wrangler. The National Science Foundation's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure awarded TACC and its collaborators 11.2 million dollars in November of 2013 to build and operate the Wrangler supercomputer. Indiana University, TACC, and the University of Chicago worked together on the project. In April of 2015, Wrangler began early operations for the open science community, where results are made freely available to the public. Wrangler will augment the Stampede supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the world. And Wrangler will join the cyberinfrastructure of NSF-funded XSEDE, the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment. Niall Gaffney:We went to propose to build Wrangler with (the data world) in mind. We kept a lot of what was good with systems like Stampede, but then added new things to it like a very large flash storage system, a very large distributed spinning disc storage system, and high speed network access to allow people who have data problems that weren't being fulfilled by systems like Stampede and Lonestar to be able to do those in ways that they never could before.