The next big thing in supercomputing may well have arrived.

Recently, Sun Microsystems along with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas have unveiled "Ranger" claimed to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, based on Sun's Constellation System.

The USP of "Ranger" is its peak performance of 504 Teraflops (trillion floating point operations) per second; which approaches 'petascale' or one quadrillion floating point instructions per second.

It is believed that with such power, "Ranger" will be able to run simulations and other computations of a scope never before achieved or imagined. This ability will enable scientific breakthroughs and spur economic growth in every area ranging from weather forecasting to astrophysics.

TACC chose Sun out of several vendors because the company offered the best overall performance thanks to its Constellation System and the open petascale architecture of this system. The architecture promises to reduce switching elements by a factor of 300, cabling by a factor of six, and system footprint by up to 20 percent.

So what's inside this monster of a supercomputer?

Eighty-two Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems racks, with each rack holding 48 Sun Fire 6000 Blade Servers for a total of 3,936. Each blade has four quad-core AMD processors that makes a total of 15,744 AMD processors, with 62,976 cores. The Sun Blade 6048 Modular System has an ultra-dense unibody chassis that saves about 500 lbs per rack when compared with traditional chassis and rack combinations. "Ranger" has 72 Sun Fire X4500 storage servers, each with 48 500GB drives, yielding 1.7 petabytes of raw storage capacity and 125 terabytes of memory.

And the supercomputer happens to link two Sun Datacenter Switch 3456s -- claimed to be the world's fastest InfiniBand switch -- with up to 110 terabits aggregate bandwidth.

To complete the picture, Sun unites the supercomputer's powerful hardware with software robust enough to handle petascale computing.