The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is one of the leading supercomputing centers in the United States. TACC develops and deploys some of the most powerful computing resources in the world, enabling discoveries that wouldn’t otherwise be possible and transforming research across a broad range of disciplines.
TACC’s mission is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. To achieve this mission, TACC designs, builds, operates, and maintains high-performance computing systems for a diverse set of users from across academia and industry. TACC also trains scientists and engineers on how to effectively use these systems to address their computational challenges. In addition to operating its own supercomputers, TACC supports national cyberinfrastructure projects such as Stampede2 at The University of Texas at Austin and Wrangler at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Supercomputers are used for a wide variety of compute-intensive tasks including scientific simulation, data analysis, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Researchers who use TACC resources are studying everything from cancer to climate change; developing new materials and drugs; designing more efficient engines; improving agricultural productivity; simulating nuclear reactions; making movie special effects; and much more.
In order to support such a broad range of users with widely varying needs, TACC provides a suite of different types of supercomputing systems each optimized for specific workloads. These include:
Lonestar5 – A general purpose system designed for demanding production workloads including traditional HPC applications as well as big data analytics using Apache Hadoop or Spark frameworks
Stampede2 – One of the most powerful academic supercomputers in existence today with peak performance exceeding 18 petaflops
Maverick2 – A GPU-accelerated system featuring NVIDIA Volta GPUs ideal for deep learning training & inference workloads
Wrangler – A large scale data management & analysis system featuring an SGI InfiniteStorage appliance integrated with Hadoop & Spark frameworks