Texas Advanced Computing Center

Texas Advanced Computing Center
Name	Texas Advanced Computing Center
Formation	2001
Headquarters	University of Texas at Austin
Type	Research center
Leader title	Director
Leader name	Dan Stanzione
Employees	200+

Texas Advanced Computing Center is a computational research center at the University of Texas at Austin that provides high-performance computing resources, advanced data storage, and cyberinfrastructure services to researchers across United States, Mexico, and international partners. The center supports scientific, engineering, and scholarly work through supercomputers, cloud platforms, data management, and education programs that connect to national initiatives and federal agencies. TACC is embedded in collaborations with national laboratories, universities, and industry consortia to enable large-scale simulation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence research.

History

TACC was founded within the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, building on earlier computing efforts at Texas and partnerships with the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and other agencies. Early milestones include deployment of systems tied to the TeraGrid project, collaboration with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and integration with the XSEDE cyberinfrastructure program. Leadership has included directors who coordinated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Over two decades TACC advanced from campus clusters to nationally recognized machines like those that participated in competitions such as the TOP500 and collaborations with vendors including Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. The center has contributed to projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, NASA, Department of Defense, and private foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Facilities and Infrastructure

TACC operates large-scale datacenters on the University of Texas at Austin campus with high-performance networking connections to the Energy Sciences Network, Internet2, and regional research networks like LEARN (Texas) and TENET (South Africa) for global science collaboration. Storage infrastructure includes parallel file systems from vendors like IBM and NetApp and object storage architectures supporting petabyte-scale datasets used by projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The center maintains specialized systems for machine learning accelerators from NVIDIA and CPU-based clusters using processors from Intel and AMD. Power and cooling systems were engineered with partners such as Schneider Electric and Siemens to support dense racks and liquid cooling trials used in deployments with Cray and HPE Cray. TACC’s facilities host visualization theaters that have supported exhibits tied to institutions like the Smithsonian Institution and planetarium collaborations with the American Museum of Natural History.

Supercomputing Systems

TACC has hosted a sequence of flagship supercomputers including systems built with architectures from Cray Inc., Dell EMC, HPE, and custom integrations employing GPU accelerators from NVIDIA. Notable deployments have been benchmarked on lists such as the Green500 and TOP500, and systems have been used for computational fluid dynamics studies referencing codes used at NASA Ames Research Center and Sandia National Laboratories. TACC resources have supported large-scale molecular dynamics with software from creators associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory and quantum chemistry computations used by research teams from MIT and Stanford University. The center’s clusters interoperate with cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and research clouds associated with Google Cloud Platform for hybrid workflows. TACC has also contributed to open-source software stacks like those from OpenMPI, SLURM Workload Manager, and projects led by contributors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Research and Applications

Researchers using TACC resources span collaborations with institutions such as Rice University, Texas A&M University, Princeton University, Harvard University, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and international centers including CERN. Application domains include climate modeling in partnership with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, astrophysics simulations tied to projects with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, genomics analyses supported by National Human Genome Research Institute workflows, and materials science simulations linked to Materials Project investigators. TACC-supported teams have contributed to earthquake modeling for the Southern California Earthquake Center and hurricane forecasting collaborations with NOAA Hurricane Center. Projects have included machine learning work for healthcare with collaborators at MD Anderson Cancer Center and biomedical imaging initiatives with Mayo Clinic. Computational social science studies have incorporated datasets from institutions like Pew Research Center and historical digitization work with the Library of Congress.

Education and Outreach

TACC runs training and internship programs collaborating with universities such as University of Florida, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, and summer research programs aligned to the NSF REU model. Outreach includes workshops with professional societies like the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and educational partnerships with K–12 initiatives coordinated with the Texas Education Agency and museum programs at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. The center provides tutorials and materials used by faculty at institutions including Carnegie Mellon University and University of Washington to teach high-performance computing curricula. TACC also hosts symposiums and conferences attended by representatives from Intel Labs, NVIDIA Research, ARM Ltd., Red Hat, and international consortia such as the European Grid Infrastructure.

Partnerships and Funding

Funding and partnerships have involved federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Collaborative projects have been co-developed with corporate partners including IBM Research, Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms, Oracle Corporation, and regional technology firms in Austin, Texas such as Dell Technologies. Academic partnerships span the University of Texas System and consortia like XSEDE and the High Performance Computing Modernization Program. Philanthropic support and grants have been received from organizations like the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and technology transfer efforts have engaged with the Austin Technology Incubator and startup accelerators connected to Y Combinator founders. TACC’s strategic alliances include memberships with the OpenStack Foundation community and collaborations on standards with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Category:University of Texas at Austin Category:Supercomputer sites