Intel Chip Chat

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has created some of the most powerful scientific supercomputers in the world, and currently supports over 3,500 different projects. TACC’s system’ capabilities are built with large-scale scientific data in mind, and it has provided millions computational hours for partners like CERN, LIGO Lab, and individual researchers tackling data-intensive problems. In this interview, we talked to Dr. Dan Stanzione, the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin and the Executive Director of TACC. He discusses the architecture and capabilities of Frontera, TACC’s newest HPC cluster. In June 2019, Top500 ranked Frontera as the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world making it the most powerful HPC system at any academic institution, and Stanzione theorizes that it may be the most capable general-purpose HPC system in the world for some applications. Frontera’s architecture includes 8,000 servers, each powered by 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon®