The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is a research center for advanced computational science, engineering and technology. TACC is located on UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus.
TACC provides comprehensive advanced computing resources and support services to researchers in Texas and across the USA. TACC also conducts research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support users of these resources. Through the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid project, these resources and services are also made available to the national academic research community.
TACC collaborators include researchers in other UT Austin departments and centers, at Texas universities in the High Performance Computing Across Texas Consortium [1], and at other U.S. universities and government laboratories.
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TACC research and development activities are supported by several federal programs, including:
In September 2006, the NSF granted TACC a $59 million award to purchase deploy a supercomputer system. The system, dubbed "Ranger", built in a partnership with Sun Microsystems, went into production on February 4, 2008. It entered the Top500 list in June 2008 as the fourth fastest computer over all. (In the June 2011 Top500 list, Ranger is still the 17th fastest supercomputer worldwide.)
Ranger is the first Sun Constellation System in production. It includes 62,976 processor cores (provided by 15,744 Opteron quad-core processors in 3,936 quad-socket Sun Blade server nodes) running the CentOS Linux distribution, and originally had peak performance of 504 teraflops, memory of 123 terabytes and disk storage of 1.73 petabytes.[3][4] It was upgraded to faster AMD Opteron processors in June 2008, with peak performance of 580 teraflops.[5]
Lonestar enters the HPC community in 2003 and was ranked 26 in November 2003 Top500. Using Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers and Cray Supercomputer, the cluster reached peak performance of 3672 gigaflops. The upgrade in 2004 increased the number of processors to 1024 and the peak rate of 6338 gigaflops. The second production (Lonestar 2) in 2006 is deployed with Dell PowerEdge 1855 servers and Infiniband. (1300 processors, 2000 gigabytes memory, peak performance 8320 gigaflops.) Later the year, TACC moves to its third production combining Dell PowerEdge 1955 servers to produce a 5200-processor cluster with peak performance of 55,473 gigaflops and 10400 gigabytes memory. Lonestar 3 is ranked World's twelfth fastest supercomputer in November 2006 Top500. [6]
In April, 2011, TACC announced the new upgrade of Lonestar supercomputer. The $12 million cluster replaces its predecessor with 1,888 Dell M610 PowerEdge blade servers, each with two six-core Intel Xeon 5600 processors. Lonestar 4 will provide almost 200 million processor core hours per year to the national scientific community. In the June 2011 Top500 list, Lonestar 4 is the 28th fastest supercomputer. This fourth-production includes 22,656 processing cores and produces peak performance of 302 teraflops, 44.3 terabytes memory, and 1.2 petabytes disk space.