The University of Texas has been tabbed by NSF to lead a new supercomputing center.
The National Science Foundation is making a major investment to build a new Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF) facility
The supercomputing center will be led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center, located at The University of Texas at Austin. According to a university news release, the initial investment will be $457 million. The LCCF will also collaborate with these four university centers to strengthen the country’s cyberinfrastructure capacity:
- Atlanta University Center Consortium, a collaboration of four historically Black colleges and universities: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College and Morehouse School of Medicine.
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
- Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
- San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego.
In addition, The Ohio State University will help develop the software stack for high-performance networking, and Cornell University will aid in workforce development.
High end computation — using large-scale simulations, data analysis and artificial intelligence — is increasingly essential to many areas of research and development. The LCCF is expected to revolutionize computational research across multiple subjects in science and engineering. According to NSF, the project will also include education and public outreach plans to grow the science and engineering workforce and ensure widespread benefits from the facility.
“LCCF represents a pivotal step forward in our mission to support transformative research across all fields of science and engineering,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, in the agency’s announcement. “This facility will provide the computational resources necessary to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time, enabling researchers to push the boundaries of what is possible.”
The LCCF is expected to begin operations during 2026, at which time it will represent the largest academic supercomputer dedicated to open-scientific research in the NSF portfolio. Its supercomputer, Horizon, will provide a tenfold increase in simulation performance over the current NSF Leadership-Class Computing system, Frontera. And for AI applications, it’s estimated the new center will enable a 100x improvement over Frontera capabilities.
In addition to the hardware, the project will add software and service enhancements designed to maximize the power of the LCCF for new applications. Access to the facility will be open to scientists and engineers nationwide, with allocations to the facility determined through open peer-reviewed processes, according to the announcement.
“We are experiencing a trend where an exponentially increasing number of problems can be solved by computing in general and artificial intelligence in particular. These are great strengths of our University. This investment will enable UT to make even greater impacts by addressing more challenges using AI, computational science and other disciplines,” said UT President Jay Hartzell, in a news release from the university. “We are excited about the privilege to continue in our role as an enabler of work that serves and improves society, and we are grateful to NSF and to our longtime partner in advanced computing, Dell Technologies. We are especially grateful to Congressman John Carter for his leadership in securing this funding.”
The Texas Advanced Computing Center is currently recognized as one of the nation’s leading academic supercomputing centers. In its news release, the university emphasized that its “researchers have modeled the coronavirus in the early stages of the pandemic, provided computing to confirm the existence of gravitational waves, and increased the speed and accuracy of storm surge forecasts in hurricanes.” It also said that as part of its 10-year strategic plan, the university aims to become the highest-impact public research university in the world.