Frontera

The Fastest Academic Supercomputer in the U.S.

In 2018, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $60 million grant to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to deploy a new petascale computing system, Frontera. Frontera opens up new possibilities in science and engineering by providing computational capability that makes it possible for investigators to tackle much larger and more complex research challenges across a wide spectrum of domains.

Deployed in June 2019, Frontera is the fastest supercomputer on a university campus in the U.S. Early user access began in June 2019, and the system entered full production in September 2019.

Up to 80% of the available hours on Frontera, more than 55 million node hours each year, will be made available through the NSF Petascale Computing Resource Allocation program.

System Specifications

The primary computing system was provided by Dell EMC and powered by Intel processors, interconnected by a Mellanox Infiniband HDR and HDR-100 interconnect. The system has 8,368 available compute nodes.

Processors	Intel 8280 “Cascade Lake”
Cores/Node	56 (28 per socket)
Clock Rate	2.7Ghz (Base Frequency)
Peak Node Performance	4.8TF, Double Precision
Memory/Node	192GB DDR-4
Local Disk	480GB SSD drive
Network	Mellanox Infiniband, HDR-100

Liquid Submerged System

Processors	Intel Xeon CPU E5-2620 v4
Cores/Node	32 (16 per socket)
Clock Rate	2.1Ghz
GPU	360 - NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 (4/Node)
Clock Rate	2.1Ghz
Peak Performance	4PF, Single Precision
Memory/Node	128GB DDR-4 Synchronous 2400 MHz
Local Disk	240GB SSD drive
240GB SSD drive	Mellanox Infiniband, FDR

System Interconnect

Frontera compute nodes are interconnected with HDR-100 links to each node, and HDR (200Gb) links between leaf and core switches. The interconnect is configured in a fat tree topology with a small oversubscription factor of 11:9.