Supercomputing scientists to launch and operate powerful supercomputer

 

POSTED ON Oct 05, 2018

 

When launched in 2019, the Frontera supercomputer is expected to help scholars improve their ability to generate simulation models, such as this one of Earth’s mantle created by a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. (Courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin).

If completed today, the supercomputer would rank as the fifth most powerful, the third fastest in the United States and the largest at any university, according to the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Supercomputing scientists at Texas A&M University are set to collaborate with nine other U.S. research universities to launch and operate the Frontera supercomputer.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin will acquire Frontera through a $60 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

“Frontera will provide scholars with an amazing volume of computing power, memory, storage and bandwidth,” said Honggao Liu, director of High-Performance Research Computing at Texas A&M.

“To match just one second of Frontera’s computing power, a researcher would have to perform one calculation every second for one billion years. Frontera will allow researchers across the nation to pursue breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, geosciences, biological sciences, computational sciences, data sciences, social sciences, engineering, and many other disciplines. We are proud to play a vital role in making this possible.”

A unit of Texas A&M’s Division of Research, High-Performance Research Computing will work with a world-class team to assist the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin in deploying and maintaining Frontera.

The team includes specialists from the University of Texas at Austin, the California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Utah, Ohio State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Davis.