Dr. Jay Boisseau, Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), The University of Texas at Austin

The Most Powerful Computer in the World: Early Results and Future Plans

The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin is building the most powerful supercomputer in the world in late 2007 to enable breakthrough scientific research. This new system, Ranger, will have over 62,000 processing cores and a peak performance of over 500 trillion operations per second. Leading scientists across the US—including many here in Texas—will use Ranger to model, simulate, and analyze the complex but important problems that were previously impossible to address. This presentation will describe the Ranger system in detail, present some initial results, and talk about how Ranger and the project team will enable unprecedented computational research that advances science and society.

John ("Jay") R. Boisseau graduated with a bachelors degree in astronomy and physics from the University of Virginia in 1986 while also working as a computer consultant. He continued to work in Charlottesville for an additional year as a scientific programmer, then entered the graduate program in astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. After obtaining his masters degree in 1990, Boisseau initiated his dissertation research on modeling the dynamics of Type Ia supernovae using Cray supercomputers. This work stimulated his interest in high performance computing, and led him to join the staff of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center as a programmer analyst in 1994 while continuing his supernova modeling research. At ARSC, Boisseau helped develop and lead several projects and activities in the relatively new center while supporting a growing scientific user community.

Boisseau completed his dissertation and joined the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in 1996 to advance his career in high performance computing. At SDSC, Dr. Boisseau became an Associate Director and created the Scientific Computing Department, with groups specializing in applications optimization, performance modeling, parallel tools development, grid portals development, and user support. He led several major SDSC projects for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) and also led SDSC's participation in the Department of Defense (DoD) Programming Environments and Training (PET) program. He also founded the IBM Scientific Computing User Group while at SDSC.

In June 2001, Boisseau returned to Austin to become the director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Under his direction, TACC has grown in size and stature to become one of the leading academic advanced computing centers in the US. Boisseau initiated a strong and growing research and development program at TACC while enhancing the computational resources to provide world-class capabilities, culminating in the recent award to TACC of the largest NSF award in UT Austin history: $59 million to acquire one of the most powerful computing system in the world in 2007 and to support US open research for four years. TACC participates as a resource provider and a technology developer in the NSF TeraGrid, with Boisseau serving as the UT Austin PI and a member of the Executive Steering Committee. Boisseau also leads UT Austin's involvement in the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) consortium and is beginning to work with other institutions in the UT System to enhance their research programs by leveraging TACC's advanced computing systems and expertise.

Boisseau's professional activities include performance characteristics of high-end computing systems and microprocessors, and the development of grid technologies and portals for computational science. His newest interest is the application of HPC and grid technologies to computational biology and biomedicine.