ABOUT FRONTERA

In 2018, a new NSF-funded petascale computing system, Frontera, was awarded for deployment at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Frontera opens up new possibilities in science and engineering by providing computational capabilities that make it possible for investigators to tackle much larger and more complex research challenges across a wide spectrum of scientific domains.

Frontera is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and the fastest supercomputer on a university campus. It replaces the soon-to-be decommissioned Blue Waters system, as the leadership-class system in NSF’s cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.
Up to 80% of the available compute time on Frontera — more than 55 million node hours each year — will be made available through the NSF Petascale Computing Resource Allocations program. Early user access began in June 2019, and the system entered full production in September 2019.

 

39

petaFLOPS

448,448

Processing
Cores

#13

Most Powerful
Worldwide

 

Partners

A world-class team is partnering on the planning, deployment and operations of Frontera, led by faculty of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Science at The University of Texas at Austin. Academic partners include scientists from:

  • Caltech
  • Cornell University
  • Princeton University
  • University of California, Davis
  • Stanford University
  • The University of Chicago
  • The University of Utah
  • The Ohio State University
  • The Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Texas A&M

Frontera combines Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with 2nd generation Intel Xeon processors and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects, and incorporates innovative storage and novel cooling systems. Technology Partners include:

  • Dell
  • Intel
  • Mellanox
  • DataDirect Networks
  • CoolIT
  • Cooltera
  • Green Revolution Cooling
  • NVIDIA
  • IBM

Building Frontera

Construction of the Frontera supercomputer in pictures

Phase 2 Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF)

The project planning effort for a Phase 2 system with at least 10x performance improvement will incorporate a community-driven process that will include leading computational scientists and technologists from around the country and leverage strategic public-private partnerships. Learn more >>

Acknowledging Use of Frontera

Please use the following statement when acknowledging use of computational time on Frontera, or help from the support team.

This research is part of the Frontera computing project at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Frontera is made possible by National Science Foundation award OAC-1818253.

Teams who have NSF Petascale Computational Resource (PRAC) Awards should also acknowledge those awards.

Citation
Dan Stanzione, John West, R. Todd Evans, Tommy Minyard, Omar Ghattas, and Dhabaleswar K. Panda. 2020. Frontera: The Evolution of Leadership Computing at the National Science Foundation. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC ’20), July 26–30, 2020, Portland, OR, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311790.3396656