NSF Awards Compute Time on TACC’s Frontera Supercomputer to 49 Projects
April 9, 2020
April 9, 2020 — The most powerful supercomputer in the world for academic research has established its mission for the coming year.The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced that the National Science Foundation has approved allocations of supercomputing time on Frontera to 49 science projects for 2020-2021. Time on Frontera is awarded based on a project’s need for very large scale computing to make science and engineering discoveries, and the ability to efficiently use a supercomputer on the scale of Frontera.The projects selected range from efforts to model the global climate to simulating tornadoes over the lifetime of a storm to designing vehicles for hypersonic flight. The projects are led by researchers at 34 universities across 16 states and began April 1, 2020.Frontera is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded leadership-class computer system designed to be used by the most experienced academic computational scientists in the nation. In 2018, NSF awarded TACC a $60 million grant to design and build the system, and another $60 million to operate the system for five years. Frontera was deployed in September 2019 and since last fall, teams of early users — selected by NSF or granted discretionary access to the system — have successfully used Frontera for science.”Computation and data-analytics are now an integral part of the scientific discovery workflow for many fields of science and engineering,” said Edward Walker, Program Director in the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. “The Frontera system, as well as the expert team assembled to support the scientists using the system, serves as an important instrument for the nation. NSF funded Frontera to inspire new transformative ideas and explorations, and to shed light on fundamental scientific discoveries that would not be possible otherwise.”The allocations awarded this month represent the first cohort of Frontera users selected by the Large Resource Allocation Committee (LRAC) — a peer-review committee of computational science experts convened annually to assess the readiness and appropriateness of projects for time on Frontera.To be considered for an LRAC allocation, researchers needed to justify the scientific need for the request, and be able to use at least 250,000 node hours (with 56 cores per node) annually, with a maximum award of 5 million node hours per project. Approximately one-third of submitted proposals were awarded time on Frontera.The projects awarded allocations on Frontera will utilize a total of 54 million node hours. They constitute approximately 65% of the total time on the system being allocated for this year.An additional 30% of the total time on Frontera will be awarded to “Pathways” projects — smaller allocations to science teams with a strong scientific justification for access to a leadership-class computing resource who have not yet demonstrated code readiness — and “Large-Scale Community Partnerships”— extended allocations of up to three years to support long-lived science and engineering experiments. (Awards for those two tracks will be announced later this month.) A final 5% will be awarded on an as-needed basis to projects of urgent need, educational projects, and industrial collaborations.”We’re excited by the strength of the applications and the breadth of science that Frontera will support,” said Tommy Minyard, TACC Director of Advanced Computing Systems.
Among the awardees is Ivan Soltesz, a neuroscientist at the Stanford School of Medicine who received an allocation of 1.4 million node hours on Frontera to develop a data-driven, biologically-constrained model of the hippocampal network at scale.
“Our generous allocation of compute time on Frontera makes it possible to perform uniquely large-scale, data-driven simulations of key brain cell networks involved in memory with unprecedented biological realism,” Soltesz said.Another awardee, Caroline Riedl, research assistant professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, is part of a large international collaboration analyzing particle collision data from the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN. Riedl was awarded 1.5 million hours to unravel the mass of hadrons and the quark structure of protons. Her work will analyze past particle physics experiments from the COMPASS experiment and explore new detectors for quantum chromodynamics research (COMPASS++/AMBER).”We were very excited to learn that our request for an LRAC allocation on TACC’s Frontera was approved,” Riedl said. “The Frontera resources will allow us to analyze the data collected with the nuclear physics experiment COMPASS at CERN significantly faster and at greater precision and answer questions like: what holds the world together at its core? And what is the origin of the mass of objects in our daily life?”Daniel Bodony, Blue Waters Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will use his allocation of 5 million node hours on Frontera to study fluid-thermal-structure interactions, one of the principal challenges that inhibits hypersonic vehicle design.”Our allocated time on Frontera will enable us to understand how hypersonic vehicles interact with the very fast, hot, and turbulent flows they generate,” Bodony said. “We are especially interested in predicting and modeling how the vehicle’s external surface responds – deforms and heats-up – to the high-speed flow, as well as how the surface changes impact the flow itself.”
An award of compute time on Frontera will enable Carnegie Mellon Astrophysicist Tiziana DiMatteo to perform cosmological simulations that follow the fate of the universe from the Big Bang all the way to the formation of all galaxies and their massive black holes.
“The novel HPC framework developed for Frontera, driven by CPUs and on-chip neural network accelerators, will allow us to merge generative deep learning with cosmological codes,” DiMatteo said. “AI methods will accelerate cosmological simulations to forge new paths as cosmology moves into the Hyper-Moore regime.”
Frontera is the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world, the largest at any university, and the fastest non-accelerated (primarily CPU-based) system in the world, according to the latest Top500 list.
“Frontera is an important national resource, helping to accelerate academic research and maintain U.S. technological competitiveness,” said Minyard. “NSF’s investment in cyberinfrastructure, and their trust in TACC to build and operate Frontera, is of paramount importance to the health, security and well-being of our nation.”
About Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)TACC designs and deploys the world’s most powerful advanced computing technologies and innovative software solutions to enable researchers to answer complex questions like these and many more. Every day, researchers rely on our computing experts and resources to help them gain insights and make discoveries that change the world. TACC’s environment includes a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure ecosystem of leading-edge resources in high performance computing (HPC), visualization, data analysis, storage, archive, cloud, data-driven computing, connectivity, tools, APIs, algorithms, consulting, and software. In addition, our skilled experts work with thousands of researchers on more than 3,000 projects each year.
Source: Aaron Dubrow, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents some of the most challenging demands in information technology, especially concerning computing power and data movement. As a result of these challenges, high-performance computing Read more…
With the exascale era underway, the HPC community is already turning its attention to zettascale computing, the next of the 1,000-fold performance leaps that have occurred about once a decade. With this in mind, the ISC Read more…
Texas Tech University. Their middle name is ‘tech’, so it’s no surprise that they’ve been fielding not one, but two teams in the last three Winter Classic cluster competitions. Their teams, dubbed Matador and Red Read more…
Hailing from Fayetteville, NC, Fayetteville State University stayed under the radar in their first Winter Classic competition in 2022. Solid students for sure, but not a lot of HPC experience. All good.
They didn’t Read more…
Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based quantum software start-up, announced today it would build its own testbed of quantum computers, starting with use of Rigetti’s Novera 9-qubit QPU. The approach by a quantum Read more…
Morehouse College? The university is well-known for their long list of illustrious graduates, the rigor of their academics, and the quality of the instruction. They were one of the first schools to sign up for the Winter Read more…
With the exascale era underway, the HPC community is already turning its attention to zettascale computing, the next of the 1,000-fold performance leaps that ha Read more…
Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based quantum software start-up, announced today it would build its own testbed of quantum computers, starting with use o Read more…
MLCommons, organizer of the popular MLPerf benchmarking exercises (training and inference), is starting a new effort to benchmark AI Safety, one of the most pre Read more…
As the AI revolution marches on, it is vital to continually reassess how this technology is reshaping our world. To that end, researchers at Stanford’s Instit Read more…
The chip market is facing a crisis: chip development is now concentrated in the hands of the few.
A confluence of events this week reminded us how few chips Read more…
Yesterday Quantonation — which promotes itself as a one-of-a-kind venture capital (VC) company specializing in quantum science and deep physics — announce Read more…
After many years, Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) was back in person and has become the conference for those who care about semiconductors and AI.
I Read more…
Google sprang a surprise at the ongoing Google Next Cloud conference by introducing its own ARM-based CPU called Axion, which will be offered to customers in it Read more…
The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…
Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…
Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…
Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…
Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…
With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…
When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…
When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…
In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…
The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…
AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades.
AMD has claimed it Read more…
Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…
Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…
Early quantum computing pioneer D-Wave again asserted – that at least for D-Wave – the commercial quantum era has begun. Speaking at its first in-person Ana Read more…
While 2023 was the year of GenAI, the adoption rates for GenAI did not match expectations. Most organizations are continuing to invest in GenAI but are yet to Read more…
The immediate effect of the GenAI GPU Squeeze was to reduce availability, either direct purchase or cloud access, increase cost, and push demand through the roof. A secondary issue has been developing over the last several years. Even though your organization secured several racks... Read more…
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.