Research Insights, HPC Expertise, Meaningful Collaborations Abound at TACCSTER 2024

Thank you to everyone who attended!

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    Attendees participated in four tutorials during TACCSTER 2024: Containers for HPC Reproducibility: Building, Deploying, and Optimizing; CUDA Programming: Basic Concepts in C and Fortran; Modern C++ for Computational Science; and Reproducible ML Workflows and Deployments with Tapis.

    It’s a wrap!

    The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin welcomed more than 100 participants for the 7th annual TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers (TACCSTER). The event exists to serve TACC’s user community from across Texas—the students, scientists, engineers, and scholars who use supercomputing resources to advance their research goals.

    The multi-day event ran from September 23-25 and included invited speakers, lightning talks, tutorials, poster sessions, one-on-one meetings with computing experts, data center tours, a Town Hall-style Q&A with TACC leadership, an interactive panel on broadening participation and opportunity through innovative programs, and opportunities for networking and collaboration.

    “TACCSTER is our primary event to interact with and learn from you, the people who use and rely on our systems,” said Joe Allen, who leads Campus Engagement at TACC. “Most of the attendees are specialists in their own domains and engaged in research computing. At the symposium they network with other scientists who use high performance computing, and they get a unique opportunity to see what is going on behind the scenes at TACC.”

    A total of 51 posters from 10 different Texas-based institutions were presented at the symposium.

    Keynote: How HPC Revolutionized Storm Surge Modeling, Clint Dawson, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, UT Austin

    This year’s keynote speaker, Clint Dawson gave an impactful talk titled How HPC Revolutionized Storm Surge Modeling. Dawson is the department chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the Cockrell School of Engineering and director of the Computational Hydraulics Group in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

    “Without HPC, we would not be able to do what we do today,” Dawson said.

    Earlier this year, Dawson received the UT Austin President’s Research Impact Award for his research in data-driven storm-surge modeling, which has had a major impact on the response to natural disasters in Texas.

    As Dawson gave his TACCSTER keynote on September 24, Hurricane Helene was fast approaching Florida. What turned into a Category 4 hurricane made landfall on September 26 and broke records for storm surge along Florida’s Gulf Coast, an area especially vulnerable to storm-driven flooding in part because of its shallow water. Helene is one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the United States.

    Dawson and his team used TACC’s Frontera supercomputer to model Hurricane Helene using data released by the National Hurricane Center every six hours.

    “We used Frontera every day, multiple times a day,” Dawson said. “We need at least a few thousand cores—speed is of the essence. We want a five-day hurricane simulation to finish in 15 minutes, because that gives us time to process the results and post them before the next forecast.”

    Currently, Dawson is working on a global model—including 600,000 historical and synthetic hurricanes—to train artificial intelligence (AI) models and to understand the storm surging packs in different parts of the world.

    “My group is heavily involved in machine learning to see what we can get out of these algorithms. Our goal is to develop a high resolution or hybrid compound flood risk analysis system,” Dawson concluded.

    Clint Dawson (left) and Stella Offner (right) both from the Oden Institute at UT Austin gave impactful keynotes.

    Keynote: Expanding the Frontera of Astrophysics: From Galaxies to Individual Stars, Stella Offner, Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, UT Austin

    Stella Offner gave a second keynote titled Expanding the Frontera of Astrophysics: From Galaxies to Individual Stars.

    Offner is the newly minted director of the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins funded by the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation to develop AI technologies for astronomical research and accelerate the pace of scientific discoveries. 

    “HPC is the lifeblood of my research,” Offner said as she began her talk, “and it is one of the primary reasons why I came to UT. My most important credential now is long-time TACC user.”

    Star formation is an extremely important process in astrophysics. It powers galaxy evolution, is responsible for the distribution of heavy elements in the universe, dictates planetary systems, and supports life on Earth.

    "It involves dynamic ranges and processes that take more than 10 million years and span 24 orders of magnitude in density and more than 11 orders of magnitude in spatial scale. These simulations are way beyond the conditions that we can achieve in labs—this is why we need TACC."

    “The Frontera supercomputer has enabled the most physically accurate simulations to date of forming stars. The calculations are the first to include cosmic rays; the first to include all the magnetic processes we need; and the first to start on galaxy scales and zoom down to individual stars that span more than 11 orders of magnitude in physics.”

    “State of the Center” Address

    TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione provided the “State of the Center,” which highlighted several milestones:

    • The center continues to upgrade, deploy, and evolve the mix of infrastructure and systems in operation for users, including deploying Stampede3, TACC’s large scale production system, and Vista, a system with a strong AI focus.
    • The center started construction of the U.S. National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility (NSF LCCF). As part of the NSF LCCF, Horizon will be the center’s next big system with 10x performance improvement for simulation and 100x improvement for AI applications over Frontera, the current leadership-class system. Horizon is expected to go into production in 2026.

    In addition, TACC has expanded its range of users across the country. The center now has users from six different federal agencies: the NSF, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. TACC also supports a wide range of academic institutions in Texas including UT System, UT Austin, and extended partnerships with Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University, and the University of North Texas.

    “One thing we have learned over 70 years of scientific computing is that innovation never stops,” Stanzione said. “We plan to be there through the complexity of it all with the stability and scale needed to help you on your research journey.”

    TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione thanks everyone for attending and shares the center's milestones over the past year.

    Students, Students, and More Students

    TACCSTER is an important event for students as it provides an opportunity to present their work in a cross-disciplinary environment.

    “Students get to test out and exercise their science communication skills. They also learn about the research their peers are doing, gain inspiration, learn new techniques, and receive feedback on their own work,” Allen said.

    Of the 51 posters from 10 different Texas-based institutions presented at the symposium, four students were selected as “Best Poster” winners:

    Haiqi Zhang, UT Arlington
    Granular Analysis of Social Media Users’ Truthfulness Stances Toward Climate Change Factual Claims

    “What excites me most is the potential of my research to make sense of vast amounts of unstructured information, particularly from social media. The ability to develop methods that can automatically categorize and analyze social media data has far-reaching applications from understanding public discourse to combating misinformation.”

    Shoaib Mansoori, UT Dallas
    Theoretical Study of Carrier Transport in Bilayer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides

    “My research is working with materials like transition metal dichalcogenides. These materials have unique properties that could lead to advancements in transistor technology. The idea that my work could contribute to making transistors more efficient or unlocking new possibilities keeps me motivated. Every step forward, whether it's a new insight or a small breakthrough adds to the bigger picture, and that’s what I find rewarding.”

    Liting Huang, UT Austin
    Simulation of the Mosquito Population after Hurricane Harvey

    “My research could someday help with future public health crises. Since no models exist for the problem I’m working on everything we try is new, which makes it interesting and exciting.”

    Marissa Llamas, UT Austin (not pictured)
    Towards Adaptive Selection of Directions in Unconstrained, Deterministic Derivative-Free Optimization

    “My research was completed under the Cyberinfrastructure Research for Social Change REU Program at TACC. What excites me most about this work is its flexibility and broad applications. Optimizing a function without relying on missing gradient information opens possibilities for solving complex problems in ways that aren’t typically explored.”

    Congratulations to the student poster winners! (pictured left to right): 1. Haiqi Zhang, Granular Analysis of Social Media Users’ Truthfulness Stances Toward Climate Change Factual Claims, UT Arlington; 2. Shoaib Mansoori, Theoretical Study of Carrier Transport in Bilayer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides, UT Dallas; 3. Liting Huang, Simulation of the Mosquito Population after Hurricane Harvey, UT Austin; 4. Marissa Llamas (not pictured), Towards Adaptive Selection of Directions in Unconstrained, Deterministic Derivative-Free Optimization, UT Austin.

    See you in 2025!

    Overall, the leadership at TACC and organizers of TACCSTER 2024 hope that the symposium was an incredible experience.

    “Our goal is to bring researchers from across the great state of Texas together to benefit from the power of collaboration across scientific fields, and to find common ground in how to use computational techniques and supercomputers to solve research problems,” Allen concluded. “We look forward to seeing you in 2025!”


    Learn More About TACCSTER 2024   |   Proceedings

    The UT System Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) program provides researchers at all UT System institutions access to advanced computing capabilities. TACC resources available through UTRC include high performance computers, large data storage, high bandwidth data access, extensive software library, training support, and computational expertise.