The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is unveiling its latest supercomputer: Lonestar6, a three peak petaflops Dell system aimed at supporting researchers across the state of Texas. Lonestar6 is scheduled for full deployment this fall.
Lonestar6 (pictured in the header image) has 560 compute nodes, each equipped with dual AMD Epyc Milan 7763 CPUs and 256GB of DDR4 memory. Its 16 GPU nodes, meanwhile, each sport the same CPUs and memory in addition to dual Nvidia A100 (40GB) GPUs. All said and done, Lonestar6 delivers “about” three petaflops of peak compute power, of which the compute nodes, at five teraflops each, constitute around 2.8 peak petaflops. The system uses hybrid cooling, with some of the components air-cooled and others using GRC’s liquid oil immersion cooling.
Lonestar6 succeeds Lonestar5, a 1.2 peak petaflops Cray XC40-based system that was launched in 2016 and ended production earlier this year. The Lonestar line of supercomputers, which began (along with TACC) in the early 2000s, is specifically meant to support Texas-based researchers. “Opening up TACC’s world-class computing ecosystem will benefit numerous students and scholars across the [University of Texas] System,” said James B. Milliken, chancellor of the system.
On that note, the system received a combined $2 million from the University of Texas at Austin (specifically, its Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and its Center for Space Research); Texas A&M University; Texas Tech University; and the University of North Texas (UNT) system. In addition to the financial contribution, the partnership opens up opportunities for access and collaborative research among the universities and TACC.
“This new collaboration will have extraordinary long-term impacts for research at University of North Texas,” said Mark McLellan, vice president of UNT’s Division of Research and Innovation. “It creates exciting opportunities for innovative and impactful research outcomes. Working with TACC will allow UNT’s research teams to effectively address a range of pressing global challenges.”
Among the challenges to be studied by Longhorn, according to Dell, are items like COVID-19 research and drug discovery, hurricane modeling, wind energy research and dark energy.
It’s a big year for TACC, with the center also celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. TACC’s executive director, Dan Stanzione, took the opportunity to celebrate how Texas’ support for advanced computing – primarily actualized through the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure initiative – has made a difference. “It has allowed Texas researchers to leapfrog the competition, providing a competitive advantage to scholars at UT System, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and now the University of North Texas,” Stanzione said.
TACC is also currently working on a leadership-class computing facility in which it intends to house a supercomputer ten times more capable than Frontera, TACC’s 23.5-Linpack petaflops beast. That facility, though, isn’t scheduled for operations until around 2025.
To learn more, read the coverage from TACC’s Aaron Dubrow here.