Austin News

Frontera, a global supercomputer at The University of Texas' Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), will continue to grow after a major contribution from Dell Technologies and Intel.

This evolution will allow COVID-19 research to revolutionize and assist in the emergency response for disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and tornados.

"The supplemental award from NSF and generous contribution from Dell Technologies and Intel will allow TACC to continue to support researchers responding to national and global emergencies without sacrificing the fundamental science that the Frontera system was built for," TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione told TACC News.

Almost 400 Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server nodes sitting on 11 racks will be added to the computer.

"NSF's continued strategic investments such as this expansion of Frontera, together with those of our academic and industry partners, strengthen the national cyberinfrastructure to serve long term needs of the fundamental research enterprise while maintaining the agility to respond to national emergencies, as TACC's engagement in the COVID-19 HPC Consortiumso aptly demonstrates," the director of the NSF Office for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, Manish Parashar, told TACC News.

After COVID-19 became rampant, TACC dedicated 30% of computing resources to go toward researching the pandemic.

"The work that TACC does enables critical research to address some of the biggest threats to human health and the environment," Jeremy Ford, vice president of strategic giving and social innovation at Dell Technologies, told TACC News. "We, along with our partners at Intel, love every chance to support local innovation in our hometown of Austin. Supporting the expansion of Frontera is a natural extension of our existing relationship with TACC and we are proud to contribute and extend the impact of technology to transform lives."

The coronavirus isn't the first emergency where TACC stepped in to help. The computing center also assisted during hurricanes Ike and Harvey, the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, and earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.

"TACC's ongoing research contributes immensely to our scientific knowledge base for years to come, but sometimes the HPC challenge is right on our doorstep," Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of High-Performance Computing at Intel, told TACC News. "These 400 additional Dell PowerEdge nodes powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors give TACC a strategic reserve to deploy in emergency situations where an urgent technological response is needed to serve our fellow citizens."