The University of Texas has been named by NSF to lead a new supercomputing center.
The National Science Foundation is making a significant investment in building a new Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF).
The supercomputing center will be led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, with an initial investment of $457 million, according to a university news release. LCCF will also work with four other university centers to strengthen the nation’s cyberinfrastructure capabilities:
- The Atlanta University Center Consortium is a collaboration between four historically black colleges and universities: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College and Morehouse School of Medicine.
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Carnegie Mellon University.
- San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego.
Additionally, Ohio State University will help develop the software stack for the high-performance network, and Cornell University will help develop the workforce.
High-end computing using large-scale simulation, data analytics and artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important in many research and development fields. The LCCF is expected to revolutionize computing research across multiple disciplines in science and engineering. According to NSF, the project will also include education and public outreach plans to develop the science and engineering workforce and derive broader benefits from the facility.
“The LCCF marks a pivotal step in our mission to support transformative research across all disciplines of science and engineering,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in the agency’s announcement. “This facility will provide the computational resources needed to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time, enabling researchers to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”
The LCCF is expected to become operational in 2026, at which point it will be the largest academic supercomputer in the NSF portfolio dedicated to open science research. That supercomputer, Horizon, will deliver 10 times the simulation performance of Frontera, the current NSF Leadership Class Computing System, and the new center is projected to improve Frontera’s capabilities by 100 times when it comes to AI applications.
In addition to hardware, the project will also add software and service enhancements designed to maximize the LCCF’s capabilities for new applications. Access to the facility will be open to scientists and engineers across the country, with allocations to the facility determined through an open peer review process, according to the announcement.
“We are experiencing a trend of exponential growth in the problems that can be solved by computing in general, and artificial intelligence in particular. These are great strengths of our university, and this investment will enable UT to have an even greater impact by using AI, computational science and other fields to address more challenges,” UT President Jay Hartzell said in a university news release. “We are honored to continue our role as a champion for work that serves and improves society, and we are grateful to NSF and Dell Technologies, our longtime partner in advanced computing. We especially thank Congressman John Carter for his leadership in securing this funding.”
The Texas Advanced Computing Center is currently recognized as one of the leading academic supercomputing centers in the U.S. The university highlighted in a news release that “researchers modeled the coronavirus early in the pandemic, provided calculations to confirm the existence of gravitational waves, and improved the speed and accuracy of hurricane storm surge forecasts.” As part of its 10-year strategic plan, the university also said it aims to become the most influential public research university in the world.
