Featured User Site:

The Texas Advanced Computing Center

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin is a world-class HPC site on the rise. Its 55 Teraflop Lonestar system, which ranked #12 on the most recent Top500 list, is being upgraded, and later this year TACC will add even more power. Thanks to a $59 million NSF grant, TACC will soon become home to Ranger, the most powerful system on the TeraGrid.

TACC Overview

Jay Boisseau

TACC has been in operation for over 20 years, and under its current director, Dr. John "Jay" R. Boisseau, TACC has emerged as a world-class academic computing center. TACC pursues leadership opportunities in specific areas, emphasizing collaboration to increase the center's impact in the national scientific community.

Because TACC supports a wide range of users in diverse lines of research, the applications run on TACC systems come from a variety of disciplines. Researchers from the University of Texas at Brownsville recently used Lonestar, a Dell PowerEdge cluster, to complete the first-ever simulation of two proximate, fast-spinning black holes, and Maverick, a Sun E25K terascale visualization system, provides ongoing support to UT Austin's Center for Space Research in early Gulf of Mexico hurricane warnings.

Other research areas supported by TACC include petroleum reservoir modeling, astrophysics, chemistry and materials science, seismic modeling, aerospace engineering, bioinformatics, and structural engineering. More than 600 active, funded research projects are currently benefiting from advanced computing resources at TACC.

As the director of TACC since June 2001, Boisseau leads integrated research and development efforts and oversees the initiation of new resources in the center's technology focus areas. Boisseau also leads TACC's involvement with the NSF TeraGrid and the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) consortium, both of which have spurred growth at TACC. Boisseau was named one of HPCwire's People to Watch in 2003.

"TACC has become one of the leading advanced computing centers in the U.S. with a talented, committed staff who provide leadership and expertise in several key technology areas," says Boisseau. "However, we didn't do it alone. There are lots of great centers and individuals out there, and we try to partner with the best to magnify our collective ability to have impact and success."

In addition to its academic alliances, TACC has forged relationships with industrial partners in both the user and vendor communities. For example, TACC provides benchmarking and technology consultation to Dell on a regular basis.

In 2007 TACC will launch the Science & Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) program, led by Melyssa Fratkin, who joined TACC from the U.S. Council on Competitiveness last year. The STAR program will provide advanced computational resources to industrial partners with scientific and engineering problems that exceed the scope of their in-house capabilities. By providing both technology and training, the STAR program will enable greater HPC usage throughout the private sector.

TACC Technology

In order to serve a variety of application needs, TACC provides systems with different architectures and capabilities. The Lonestar system is a cluster of dual-socket, dual-core nodes with a fat-tree InfiniBand interconnect topology. TACC also offers Champion, a fat-node system with 12 IBM p5 575 eight-processor Power5 nodes on a Federation switch.

Later this year TACC will unveil Ranger, the newest and most impressive system in its HPC arsenal, a 3,936 node system from Sun. Last fall TACC was the recipient of a $59 million NSF grant to partner with Sun in creating the largest system on the TeraGrid. Under the agreement, TACC will dedicate five percent of the capacity of Ranger to industrial affiliates through the STAR program, and another five percent will go to other Texas academic institutions, including small colleges, junior colleges, and minority-serving institutions. (See Table.)

On January 11, TACC dedicated a new facility on the UT Austin's J. J. Pickle Research Campus. The new building, which it shares with the Jackson School of Geosciences' Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), has a 6,000 square foot machine room to host Ranger and is expandable to provide space for future growth.

Table: HPC Resources at TACC

TACC also provides a variety of visualization systems. The largest visualization system at present is Maverick, a 128 CPU, 512 GB Sun E25K SMP with programmable commodity graphics cards and remote visualization capabilities that TACC developed in collaboration with Sun. TACC manages the Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences (ACES) Visualization Laboratory, which provides an immersive visualization environment, a tiled display, an SGI Prism graphics server, and multiple high-end visualization workstations.

Tabor Research Analysis

TACC is an important site to watch for several reasons. Most evident among them is the contribution to capability computing on the TeraGrid and the resulting advancement of NSF's cyberinfrastructure initiatives. TACC has already demonstrated success in enabling research not only at UT Austin but throughout the neighboring academic community. Furthermore, TACC's partnerships with vendors have helped to advance HPC technologies.

TACC is noteworthy for the pending implementation of its STAR program, which will benefit commercial users. According to the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, the cost of scalable servers and access to trained personnel are significant hurdles to HPC adoption by U.S. industry. By enabling companies to realize the R&D benefits of advanced computing, the STAR program might provide enough return-on-investment examples to provoke measurable new sales of entry-level HPC systems to first-time industrial users.

TACC is also contributing to a change in the supercomputing vendor landscape. Recent high-profile wins at TACC and at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have established Sun as a major player in the high-end supercomputing segment of the HPC market. Within a one-year span, Sun will have claimed the top spot on the TeraGrid to complement the most powerful supercomputer outside the U.S. AMD is another winner in both deals: Both new Sun supercomputers use AMD Opteron processors.

Tabor Research finds TACC to be a significant HPC site not merely for its scale, but rather for its impact in the HPC community. TACC's collaborative partnerships with the user and vendor communities are advancing the state of the market both at the high end and at the entry level, enabling new users and new technologies.

Would you like to nominate your user organization to be featured on the Tabor Research web site? Please email your suggestion, including a brief description of the technology in use and why it is noteworthy, to Addison Snell, Addison@TaborResearch.com.