Aug. 31, 2022 — More than 30 researchers and project staff gathered in Austin for the 2022 Frontera User Meeting held at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), August 4-5. The community of users from across the nation presented scientific talks highlighting their most recent discoveries and exchanged views on how to make the effective use of one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to meet the most demanding computational needs of the Nation’s scientists and engineers and operated by TACC, Frontera launched in 2019. Over the past 12 months, the system completed over 1.3 million jobs and delivered over 72 million node hours consumed.
The meeting keynote presentation was given by Frontera user Ping Chang, the Louis & Elizabeth Scherck Chair in Oceanography at Texas A&M University. Professor Chang talked about the computational challenges in generating current and future climate simulations for the Coupled Model Intercomparison of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Other researchers presented topics on their research supported by Frontera ranging from black holes and galaxy clusters, to hypersonic turbulence, to organ-protective epithelial cells, to superconductivity, and more. Users also exchanged views about the best ways to use this unique computational resource, and they offered feedback to TACC on how to plan for future operations of the resource.
TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione also discussed plans for the future of Frontera and took input from attendees on their requirements for the next evolution of the NSF’s large-scale computing capabilities.
Frontera is the first step in the creation of an NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF). The LCCF will wield 10 times the computing capabilities of Frontera and is anticipated to begin construction in 2024.
At the meeting, Stanzione outlined 21 CSA projects selected to begin work on Frontera for the next two years prior to the launch of LCCF. The projects cover a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines — astronomy, particle physics, turbulence, climate, natural hazards like earthquakes, viral infection, and deep learning for misinformation detection.
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Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC