You might think from the title that this is going to be a post about running … but you’d be wrong. In fact, this is the one of the very rare posts about my job.
One of the reasons I picked up my entire life and moved to Austin to come work at TACC was the chance to contribute to an organization that has the very real possibility of changing the world and making it a better place. And I still get excited every day about the amazing things we’re accomplishing. My contribution to this effort is minor, in the sense that I’m not a scientist or technologist, and I’m not actually building or running advanced computing systems. Of course, it takes good relationships and plenty of funding to make all these accomplishments possible, and that’s where I come in.
A lot of my family and friends probably have very little sense of exactly what it is we do here at TACC, so I wanted to share this article (it’s not long, so go ahead, read the darn thing!), that gives a very real picture of exactly why advanced computing, and TACC especially, is so important.
All of you are by now familiar with the force of nature that was Hurricane Ike. The Galveston and Houston areas will be feeling the consequences of this storm for months, and probably more like years, to come.
What you may not know is that all of those NOAA hurricane models that are constantly running to predict the path and severity of the storm … those models (for both Ike and Gustav before it) were able to conduct real-time forecasting using our Ranger supercomputer, which sits right down the hall from me as I write this.
For those who don’t know, Ranger is the 4th largest computing system in the world, and the most powerful system for open science research (meaning the other three are closed systems that do exclusive work for agencies like DOE, DOD, etc). And to give you some idea of the scale of this project, running these storm models together required the use of as much as 2/3 of Ranger’s full capacity … that’s 2/3 of a system which is already orders of magnitude larger than most other systems out there.
What this basically means is that TACC’s system is making this kind of forecasting possible for the first time. And when you’re talking about natural disasters, that’s not a small thing.
I just wanted to share all this, because it’s exactly this sort of research that makes me so passionate about what we do here. Working in higher ed development, there are lots of opportunities out there … there are far more development positions out there than there are qualified people to fill them. But it’s not often that you really get a chance to be a part of something this big, with this much potential for change.
It’s exciting, it’s exhausting, and in truth I wouldn’t have it any other way.
