Texas Advanced Computing Center

Texas Advanced Computing Center. The Texas Advanced Computing Center is a high-performance computing center at the University of Texas at Austin, providing advanced computational resources and expertise to the national research community. Established in 2001, it operates some of the world's most powerful supercomputers and data storage systems. Its mission is to enable discoveries across science, engineering, and the humanities through advanced computing, data analysis, and visualization.

History

The center was founded in 2001 under the leadership of director Jay Boisseau, with initial support from the University of Texas at Austin and the state of Texas. Its creation was part of a broader national initiative to expand access to high-performance computing for academic research. A pivotal early achievement was the deployment of Lonestar in 2006, which established the center as a major resource within the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure. Following the success of the Ranger system, the center became a leading partner in the NSF's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment program. The directorship passed to Dan Stanzione in 2010, under whom the center has continued to expand its portfolio of world-class systems and its role in national cyberinfrastructure.

Facilities and systems

The center's primary operations are housed at the J. J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas. It maintains a dedicated, energy-efficient data center with advanced cooling and power infrastructure. Its flagship systems have included Stampede 2, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world for open science, and Frontera, which debuted in 2019 as the fastest academic supercomputer at the time. Other major systems include the Lonestar series, the large-memory Maverick system for visualization, and the massive Corral and Stockyard data storage repositories. These resources are integrated into national networks like the National Research Platform and are accessible via the Open Science Grid.

Research and impact

The center's resources support thousands of researchers annually across a vast spectrum of disciplines, leading to breakthroughs in fields like astrophysics, climate science, molecular dynamics, and bioinformatics. Computational projects have modeled phenomena such as gravitational waves detected by LIGO, the dynamics of Hurricane Harvey, and the folding of SARS-CoV-2 proteins. Its work in data-intensive science aids major collaborations like the Large Hadron Collider experiments and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The center also advances the field of computational science itself through research in parallel computing, scientific visualization, and data mining. Its education and training programs, including workshops and the XSEDE Campus Champions initiative, build computational skills nationwide.

Organization and funding

The center is an organized research unit within the University of Texas at Austin, reporting through the university's Vice President for Research. Its primary funding comes from competitive federal grants, most notably from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Significant support has also been provided by other agencies including the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the state of Texas. The center collaborates closely with industry partners like Dell Technologies, Intel, and NVIDIA for technology development. It is a core partner in national cyberinfrastructure consortia such as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment and its successor, the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support project.

Notable projects

Notable projects enabled by the center's resources span from fundamental science to urgent public health responses. The Frontera system has been used for large-scale simulations in quantum chromodynamics and cosmological structure formation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, its systems were deployed for the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, screening millions of chemical compounds for potential therapeutics. Long-term science projects include the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System data analysis and the Antarctic Mapping Mission. The center also hosts unique digital humanities projects, such as 3D reconstructions of ancient sites and large-scale text analysis for the Perseus Digital Library.

Category:University of Texas at Austin Category:High-performance computing Category:Research institutes in Texas Category:Organizations established in 2001