ALLOCATIONS
Regarding Upcoming Pathways and LSCP Opportunities
TACC will no longer be accepting applications for the Frontera Pathways and LSCP opportunities, beginning with the allocation period starting September 1, 2025.
Frontera is now over six years old, and given the uncertainty of funding for the coming year, we cannot guarantee the availability and reliability of Frontera or its planned successor, Horizon, for a full year. As such, we do not feel we can issue full allocations in good faith at this time. Please understand that this decision was not made lightly. We recognize the importance of these opportunities in supporting the research community.
We will continue to accept allocations on Vista, or on Stampede-3 (through the NSF ACCESS program) during this time. We also welcome short term supplements and extensions to your existing Pathways/LSCP allocations through the remainder of calendar year 2025.
Under the current timelines, we expect Frontera to no longer be available after about May 31st, 2026. Should the budgets for FY2026 materialize as planned, we do expect to begin early user access for portions of the Horizon system in spring of 2026, prior to the Frontera shutdown, and Frontera may also be briefly extended.
We understand this can be disruptive to your research plans, and are looking into several options that would help support continued access and the transition to Horizon in the interim.
We encourage you to continue to monitor our website and communications for any updates regarding future allocation opportunities. We value your interest in utilizing our resources and hope to be able to support your computational needs in the future.
If you have any questions or need assistance, please submit a ticket here: https://tacc.utexas.edu/portal/tickets
Pathways and LSCP Submissions: 11/15/2024 - 12/15/2024 (for allocations starting March 1, 2025)
LRAC Submissions: 12/1/2024 - 1/15/2025 (for allocations starting April 1, 2025)
Getting an Allocation on Frontera
All activities of the Frontera project support the overriding project goal of serving "as a national resource for providing predictable and sustained long-term leadership computing capabilities for science and engineering to push the frontiers of knowledge...". In the context of Frontera, this means enabling computation-based scientific discovery with a particular focus on "big science." At least 80% of the capacity of Frontera, about 55 million node hours, will be made available to scientists and engineers around the country. For further information and detailed proposal submission guidelines, please select the "Allocation Submission Guidelines" button at the bottom of this page.
In general, proposers must show compelling science or engineering challenges that require multi-petascale computing resources, and they must be prepared to demonstrate that they can effectively exploit the multi-petascale computing capabilities offered by Frontera. Proposals from or including junior researchers are encouraged, as one of the goals of this project is to build a community capable of using petascale computing. The Frontera team will offer consulting support and assistance to each project team that is granted access through this solicitation.
Described below, we offer four allocation tracks to accommodate a range of research needs for large-scale discovery science. Frontera LRAC requests open annually for submission in December for April 1 start dates. Pathways and LSCP submission opportunities are quarterly. Startup allocations are available at all times as a means to test and benchmark your application in preparation for your research allocation submission.
Leadership Resource Allocation (LRAC) – Large allocations from 250,000 to 5,000,000 node-hours (Frontera) and up to 100,000 (Vista) to science teams with a strong scientific justification for access to a leadership-class computing resource to enable research that would otherwise not be possible. Successful applicants must demonstrate readiness to use the allocated cycles, as well as current peer-reviewed research funding to support the activities conducted on Frontera. LRAC submission deadlines will be at least once per year, possibly twice depending on availability of compute time. LRAC allocations cannot be extended, thus an annual submission to renew the allocation is required.
Pathways – Smaller allocations from 10,000 to 250,000 node-hours (Frontera) and up to 25,000 (Vista) to science teams with a strong scientific justification for access to a leadership-class computing resource, but who have not yet demonstrated code readiness to effectively utilize such a resource. Successful applicants will use the allocation award to work with the Frontera team to scale their codes in order to effectively use the system. Successful applicants must demonstrate existing research funding to support the required code and algorithm development activities on Frontera. Additionally, early career scientists and engineers with an outstanding publication record investigating novel techniques for solving potentially transformative S&E research topics are encouraged to apply. Pathways submission deadlines will be quarterly. Pathways allocations cannot be extended, thus an annual submission to renew the allocation is required.
Large-Scale Community Partnerships (LSCP) – Allocations from 25,000 to 1,000,000 node-hours (Frontera) and up to 50,000 (Vista) to support a large and typically multi-institutional community of users and beneficiaries working on the same research topic, who collectively justify the need for this scale of HPC resource but individually would not. Extended allocations can be requested for up to three years to support long-lived S&E experiments. Successful applicants must demonstrate current peer-reviewed research funding to support the activities conducted on Frontera for the time period requested. The LSCP process will make merit-based allocation awards annually for allocations spanning three years, with years 2 and 3 awarded after successful completion of a progress review including an updated computational plan for the next year. LSCP allocations cannot be extended, thus an annual submission to renew the allocation is required.
Startup Allocations – Allocations for up to 5,000 node-hours Frontera CPU and 100 node hours Frontera GPU and Lonestar6-GPU may be requested to gather benchmark data for a larger allocation request, or to test the suitability of the system for a particular research project.
Director Discretionary Allocations (DD) – Allocations for projects that don’t fit well into the three tracks described above, such as: areas of urgent need, educational usage, and industrial collaborations/research. Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis.
Archival Storage (Ranch) – Ranch is TACC’s tape archive storage system. Ranch has a substantial disk cache of approximately 30PB in front of the archive. This enables all archive data that has been used in recent months to remain on disk, and to keep small files on disk for up to several years if occasionally being re-used. Behind the disk storage are multiple tape libraries with capacity scalable to an exabyte or more.
Allocation Submission Guidelines
For questions about allocations, please submit a ticket via the TACC Ticket System, and select Frontera in the System/Resource dropdown menu.
To receive information about Frontera, including upcoming allocations opportunities, you are encouraged to subscribe to Frontera User News.
See a full list of awardees: