USA · decommissioned · hpc

Ranger

Operated by Texas Advanced Computing Center at Texas Advanced Computing Center .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 326.00 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 503.81 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 64.7%
Cores: 62,976
Power: 2.00 MW
Per watt: 0.2 GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- Sun Constellation System	Sun Microsystems ORCLNYSE rolls up to Oracle	-	Verified	top500.org api.nsf.gov
CPU	AMD Opteron (Barcelona) 2.0GHz CPUs x86-64 · 4C · 2 GHz · 65 nm · 95 W four quad-core 2.0GHz AMD Opteron (Barcelona) processors per SunBlade x6420 node, 3,936 nodes	AMD AMDNASDAQ	62,976 reported	Verified	top500.org rdworldonline.com
Interconnect	Sun Magnum InfiniBand DDR Switch Interconnect full non-blocking fat tree · DDR 4x, 20Gb/s per port Sun Magnum InfiniBand DDR switch (Sun Datacenter Switch 3456)	Sun Microsystems ORCLNYSE rolls up to Oracle	-	Verified	top500.org rdworldonline.com

The read

TACC's Sun Constellation cluster of 3,936 SunBlade x6420 nodes, each with four 2.0GHz quad-core AMD Opteron (Barcelona) processors, on Sun's own Magnum InfiniBand DDR switch fabric; fifth on the June 2008 TOP500 at 326 TFlop/s Rmax and the first NSF Track 2 system, the largest open-science machine in the US at debut. The NSF award record independently confirms the funding, the Sun Constellation hardware and the University of Texas at Austin as awardee. R&D World's account of the 2013 retirement independently gives the same 62,976-core count and names Sun Microsystems as designer of the Magnum switch, and states Ranger was decommissioned on 4 February 2013, its racks later donated to universities in South Africa, Tanzania and Botswana. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, Rpeak and core count, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

2008-06 List debut at #5 (June 2008) source
2008-06 First operational source
2013-02 Decommissioned source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#5: TOP500, June 2008 →

Site & facility

Texas Advanced Computing Center

Location: Austin, TX, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling
Commissioned: 2007

tacc.utexas.edu

Change history

2026-09-24 Added with a rank pointer on the edition where it ranked highest

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
api.nsf.gov	names system only	· counts: 62976
top500.org	names system, part and count	AMD Opteron (Barcelona) 2.0GHz · counts: 62976

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.