User Updates

Ranch will be unavailable on Tuesday, July 28 from 9:00 AM (CDT) to 7:00 PM (CDT) for annual maintenance on our Spectra Logic tape libraries. 

Stampede 3 will be unavailable from 7:00 AM until 8:00 PM on Tuesday, July 21st in order to perform system maintenance.

On July 15th, from 8 - 10 PM Central, TACC MFA will be unavailable during a migration.   Expected downtime is ~1 hour for updates and database migrations.  All authentication requiring tokens will not work, but any running sessions will stay up.

On July 15th, from 8 - 10 PM Central, TACC MFA will be unavailable during a migration.   Expected downtime is ~1 hour for updates and database migrations.  All authentication requiring tokens will not work, but any running sessions will stay up.

We will be performing both a TAPIS and Portal maintenance to upgrade our infrastructure and underlying software. During this time, TAPIS-related systems as well as the TACC User Portal will be temporarily unavailable.These updates are essential to ensure the continued reliability and security of our software. We understand that your time is valuable and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.Questions? Submit a ticket: https://tacc.utexas.edu/portal/ticketsDetailsDate: Tuesday, 6/23/2026Time: 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM (Estimated duration: 90 minutes)

Ranch will undergo maintenance Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026 from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CST). Software upgrades and hardware maintenance will be performed during this time. 

Hi All,It's hard to believe that in a few weeks, Frontera will have been available for *seven* full years, far beyond its predicted lifespan. It's also hard to believe its replacement, Horizon, is taking shape on our datacenter floor. I'm pleased to be able to say that, with the cooperation of our storage vendor, we will be able to run Frontera on a "best effort" basis for a bit longer. We intend to leave the queues open until *September 30th* 2026 and will adjust end dates of allocations accordingly. When I say "intend" -- there are certain things we can't get replacements for any more, and some kinds of failures that would require "heroic measures" might cause us to shut things down a bit sooner, but we believe we can get through September (with login nodes and filesystems available a few months longer to migrate data). We can make some limited supplemental allocations available through that time, though many of you have a lot of time left to burn. Vista will keep operating as well. At the same time, we are bringing up Horizon -- we have several thousand GPUs on the floor in various states of bring up and testing (with still more to be delivered), along with a few hundred storage servers. We have started taking applications for the "early user" period - we will start reviewing those next week but keep the application period open for the next month. We will be making access available in the next couple of months, scaling up through the summer. The GPU portion of the machine will go live first -- the CPU portion won't be delivered to us until late fall. We will do a full call across all tracks for 2027, but for now, the early operations allocation will be the way to get time on the machine. Login nodes will be generally available in July to start things like data migration from Frontera. This does mean we will have some gap on the CPU side of things when Frontera shuts down, though our GPU capability will be far greater. In the interim, we have some CPU nodes on Vista and will also have Stampede3 (available through ACCESS) and Lonestar6 available with CPU nodes. If you haven't gotten ready to port to Horizon yet -- you may want to give Vista a try. The software stack will look very similar to Vista -- anything that compiles and runs there should move trivially to Horizon. Please also keep in mind if you haven't migrated your data from the old tape system to the new Ranch system yet, you have about 6 months left (and tape migrations take time -- don't save a petabyte until the end!). Keep an eye out for a few webinars and training sessions over the summer to introduce the new systems as everything is completed. While we are sorry to see Frontera go after 8 million jobs and countless new discoveries, we think you will love Horizon! Thanks,DanP.S. To request additional time and resources, please submit using the drop-down menu next to your allocation in TXRAS here: https://submit-tacc.xras.org/requests  

Due to security updates, all TACC resources will be affected and will be temporarily unavailable as the patches are applied. Jobs currently running will finish, and jobs currently in the queues will be held until the updates have completed. Login nodes will be intermittently unavailable during this process and this will affect queue wait times. We appreciate your patience as we perform this necessary maintenance. Please refer to this announcement for updates.

TACC is pleased to announce that we are now accepting LRAC submissions for the Horizon supercomputer. Horizon’s Leadership Class Computing capacity is funded by the National Science Foundation and supports the “discovery at the frontiers of science and engineering…through large scale simulation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence applications.”Horizon provides an order of magnitude performance increase over the previous Frontera system and will enable researchers to advance the state of science in every field.Currently, we are only accepting large scale LRAC requests, but smaller research allocations and startup requests will be available in the future.Please review the submission guide for detailed instructions on how to proceed:https://lccf.tacc.utexas.edu/allocations We look forward to working with you!Thank you, The TACC Team

This is a reminder that, as part of the construction of the NSF Leadership Class Computing Facility, the hardware underlying the TACC "Ranch" tape archive system is being replaced. This new Ranch system allows us to expand the capacity of the archive to an exabyte and beyond over the next several year. If there is data in the archive that you wish to keep on the new system, you will need to move it to the new hardware.Please carefully review the message below for important information on timelines, where to find your old data, where to write you new data, and directions on migrating:TimelineSeptember 30th, 2025: New Ranch hardware became available to general usersNovember 1st, 2026: End of Service (EOS), Old Ranch hardware will be removed from service.To be clear, you, or someone on your project, will need to migrate your data from the OldRanchData directory (a read-only mount of the old Ranch system) to your new directory, or project space. Data that is not copied to the new Ranch space WILL NOT be available after the end of 2026. For detailed instructions on what users need to do, please view our migration guide here: https://docs.tacc.utexas.edu/hpc/ranch-migration-2025/For very large data migrations (>= 1PB) or other special use cases, please contact the support team for assistance: https://tacc.utexas.edu/portal/ticketsWe are halfway through the migration period, so, if you haven't started migrating data, please start as soon as is convenient.

TACC's production PrivacyIdea (pidea01.tacc.utexas.edu) will be unavailable for maintenance.  This will effectively make all logins unusable from 6:00PM to 8:00PM Thursday, February 19.