Texas Advanced Computing Center

TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.

TACC research and development activities are supported by several federal programs, including: Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), XSEDE is a virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise.

TACC is one of the leading partners in the XSEDE project, whose resources include more than one petaflop of computing capability and more than 30 petabytes of online and archival data storage.

iPlant integrates high-performance petascale storage, federated identity management, on-demand virtualization, and distributed computing across XSEDE sites behind a set of REST APIs.

These serve as the basis for presenting community-extensible rich web clients that enable the plant science community to perform sophisticated bioinformatics analyses across a variety of conceptual domains.

In September 2013 it was announced that the NSF had renewed iPlant's funding for a second 5-year term with an expansion of scope to all non-human life science research.

A sustainable, open, and easy-to-use repository that organizes the images and related experimental measurements of diverse porous materials, improves access to porous media analysis results to a wider community of geosciences and engineering researchers not necessarily trained in computer science or data analysis, and enhances productivity, scientific inquiry, and engineering decisions founded on a data-driven basis.

Funded by the National Science Foundation Grant ACI-1134872 and built in partnership with Intel, Dell, and Mellanox, Stampede was stood up in September 2012, and brought online on January 7, 2013.

[4] For the June 2013 Top500 list, the benchmark was re-run using 6006 nodes (all with Xeon Phi coprocessors), delivering 5168 TFlops and moving the system up to sixth place.

Recent exponential increases in the size and quantity of digital datasets necessitate new systems such as Maverick, capable of fast data movement and advanced statistical analysis.

The $12 million Lonestar 4 cluster replaced its predecessor with 1,888 Dell M610 PowerEdge blade servers, each with two six-core Intel Xeon 5600 processors (22,656 total cores).

It supports MySQL and Postgres databases, high-performance parallel file system, web-based access, and other network protocols for storage and retrieval of data to and from sophisticated instruments, HPC simulations, and visualization laboratories.

To support the research being performed on our high-performance computing systems, TACC provides advanced visualization resources and consulting services, which are accessible both in-person and remotely.

This configuration allows for an exploration of visualizations at an extremely high level of detail and quality compared to a typical moderate pixel count projector.