In August of 2018, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin was selected as the sole awardee of the National Science Foundation’s “Towards a Leadership Class Computing Facility” solicitation. In this talk, I will describe the main components of the award: the Phase 1 system, “Frontera”, which will be the largest University-based supercomputer in the world when it comes online in 2019; the plans for facility operations and scientific support for the next five years; and the plans to design a Phase 2 system in the mid-2020s to be the NSF Leadership system for the latter half of the decade, with capabilities 10x beyond Frontera. The talk will also cover the growing and shifting nature of the scientific workloads that require advanced capabilities, the technology shifts and challenges the community is currently facing, and the ways TACC has and is restructuring to face these challenges.
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