User Updates

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,

Dan

P.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