University Supercomputers Are Science’s Unsung Heroes, and Texas Will Get the Fastest Yet
The machine is called Frontera.
By Rob Verger
Supercomputers are powerful machines with great names — Blue Waters, Bridges, Jetstream, Comet. But a new one will soon be joining that list: Frontera. The $60 million machine will live at the University of Texas at Austin and is scheduled to come online next year.
“It will be the fastest machine ever deployed at a university in the US,” says Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
With supercomputers, the title of fastest is a moving target — what’s perhaps more important is not the exact ranking, but that they’re available for researchers to use in the first place. Right now, the fastest supercomputer in the world is called Summit, and it’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and is specifically tailored for AI. But supercomputers located not at government labs but at universities — like Frontera and its ilk — play a crucial role in the everyday research that scientists do.
Frontera will be “requestable by anybody doing unclassified research,” Stanzione says.
