UT Austin To Receive Fastest Supercomputer At Any University

Anticipated early projects on Frontera include analyses of particle collisions from the Large Hadron Collider, global climate modeling, improved hurricane forecasting and multi-messenger astronomy. 

The National Science Foundation plans to award $60 million to The University of Texas’ (UT) Advanced Computing Center (TACC) for the deployment of Frontera, a new supercomputer that will be the fastest at any university and the third fastest in the United States.

The Frontera, which is Spanish for “frontier,” supercomputer will begin operations in 2019. Frontera will be located at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus at 10100 Burnet Road and will operate for five years.

To match what Frontera will compute in just one second, a person would have to perform one calculation every second for about a billion years.

Anticipated early projects on Frontera include analyses of particle collisions from the Large Hadron Collider, global climate modeling, improved hurricane forecasting and multi-messenger astronomy. 

While in service, Frontera will be used to build a future system that would be far more powerful than it is. That supercomputer could be deployed as Phase 2 of Frontera.

Faculty at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin will lead the world-class science applications and technology team, with partners from other out-of-state universities.

Texas A&M University and other out-of-state universities will ensure the system runs effectively in all areas, including security, user engagement and workforce development.

This article was originally published by Strategic Partnerships Inc.