Supercomputing scientists at Texas A&M University will collaborate with nine other U.S. research universities to launch and operate one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin will acquire the supercomputer, known as Frontera, through a $60 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Frontera is scheduled to begin operations in 2019. If completed today, the supercomputer would rank as the fifth most powerful in the world, the third fastest in the United States and the largest at any university, according to TACC.
“Frontera will provide scholars with an amazing volume of computing power, memory, storage and bandwidth,” said Honggao Liu, director of High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) 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, HPRC will work with a world-class team to assist TACC in deploying and maintaining Frontera. The team includes specialists from UT-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.
About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represented annual expenditures of more than $905.4 million in fiscal year 2017. Texas A&M ranked in the top 20 of the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development survey (2016), based on expenditures of more than $892.7 million in fiscal year 2016. Texas A&M’s research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting, in many cases, in economic benefits to the state, nation and world. To learn more, visit http://research.tamu.edu.
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Media Contact: Rusty Cawley, (469) 338-9478, rcawley@tamu.edu.
