NSF, UT Austin, Tech Firms Debut Supercomputer at Texas Advanced Computing Center

Representatives from the National Science Foundation, University of Texas at Austin and several technology vendors celebrated on Tuesday the inauguration of an NSF-funded supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

TACC’s Frontera system is built through a $60M investment from NSF and designed to support discovery efforts by U.S. scientific teams, NSF said Tuesday.

The computing machine features Dell EMC‘s PowerEdge servers, Intel‘s (Nasdaq: INTC) Xeon Scalable processors and Optane DC memory, IBM‘s (NYSE: IBM) POWER9 chip architecture, NVIDIA‘s (Nasdaq: NVDA) graphics processing units, DataDirector Networks’ flash storage and Mellanox Technologies’ InfiniBand interconnect.

Frontera is also equipped with cooling products from Green Revolution Cooling, Cooltera and CoolIT.

Intel said Tuesday the new computer will facilitate research projects in the areas of artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, mechanical engineering, astronomy and medicine.

NSF expects the supercomputer to have an operational life of at least five years and operate with cloud computing platforms from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL).

Frontera was ranked fifth on the Top500 list of most advanced supercomputers worldwide in June for reaching 23.5 PetaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark on floating point computing power.

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