Horizon
Installation of nation’s largest academic supercomputer begins, ushering in a new era of open science and discovery
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the installation of Horizon, the nation’s largest academic supercomputer, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Horizon is the centerpiece of NSF’s new Leadership-Class Computing Facility (NSF LCCF), a national resource on a par with iconic scientific initiatives such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
When Phase 1 enters production in Fall 2026, Horizon will provide U.S. researchers with unprecedented computing and artificial intelligence capabilities, enabling breakthroughs across physics, climate science, medicine, energy, and beyond.
System Specifications
Developed in collaboration with Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, VAST Data, Spectra Logic, Versity, and Sabey Data Centers, the Horizon supercomputer combines cutting-edge technologies with advanced infrastructure to redefine what is possible in scientific computing.
| Performance | 360 petaflops, delivering a 10x improvement in simulation speed over Frontera, the current No. 1 academic supercomputer in the U.S. |
|---|---|
| AI Power | 20 exaflops for AI at bf16/fp16 / 80 Exaflops for AI at FP4, more than 100x improvement over today’s systems. |
| Scale | NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform and NVIDIA Vera CPU servers featuring 1 million CPU cores and 4,000 GPUs. |
| Networking | Interconnected by the NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking platform with In-Network Computing. |
| Local All-Solid State Storage | 400PB delivering well more than 10TB/s of read/write bandwidth along with multi-tenancy and Quality-of-Service capabilities. |
| Efficiency | Up to 6x more energy efficient, powered by a new 15-20 MW data center with advanced liquid cooling in Round Rock, Texas. |
User Guide
Access full documentation on system architecture, software, new & advanced user information, best practices, and troubleshooting.
NSF Award
Horizon is a National Science Foundation-funded system that is part of the the Leadership Class Computing Facility award (Award #2323116).
Horizon News
Catch up on press releases, feature stories, and announcements about Horizon.
Cite Vista
Performance Analysis of Scientific Applications on an NVIDIA Grace System, Amit Ruhela, John Cazes, John McCalpin, Carlos del-Castillo-Negrete, Junjie Li, Hang Liu, Hanning Chen, Chun-Yaung Lu, Kent Milfeld, Wenyang Zhang, Ian Wang, Lars Koesterke, John DeSantis, Nic Lewis, Sean Hempel, Dan Stanzione, Published in: SC24-W: Workshops of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SCW63240.2024.00078
Horizon Construction Gallery
