TACC’s first supercomputer delivered 50 gigaflops of performance — a fraction of the compute power found in today’s smartphones. By 2019, the Frontera supercomputer was nearly one million times more powerful, capable of 40 petaflops, or 40 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
Now, as TACC marks its 25th anniversary, it is home to the U.S. National Science Foundation Leadership-Class Computing Facility. Horizon, the facility’s centerpiece system, will deliver a tenfold performance increase over Frontera for simulation workloads and more than a hundredfold improvement for artificial intelligence applications.
When Horizon enters production in 2026, it will become the largest academic supercomputer in the NSF portfolio dedicated to open science, driving the next generation of discovery and innovation.
From our founding in 2001 to today, TACC’s mission has remained unchanged: to advance open science by putting powerful computing in the hands of researchers. That mission is at the heart of everything we do. TACC systems have powered research that includes:
Protein prediction and design research contributing to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The Nobel And Beyond
Data analysis for the LIGO project, leading to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics
XSEDE Resources Help Confirm LIGO Discovery
High-energy physics research supporting the discovery of the Higgs boson, awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics
A New EYE On The Universe
Gordon Bell Prize–winning research, including the 2025 award for a real-time tsunami digital twin
Real-Time Tsunami Digital Twin
TACC-enabled research featured on the cover of Science: Desalination Membranes to Maximize Flow, Clean More Water.
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Then (1987): Early leaders whose work helped lay the foundation for TACC.
Now (2025): Today, a team of scientists, engineers, educators, and professionals show up every day to make discovery possible that advances science and society.
UT Ranks No. 1 in U.S. for Research Funded by National Science Foundation
NSF LCCF Horizon Supercomputer To Power Breakthroughs for the Nation’s Leading Scientists
NSF announces groundbreaking Leadership-Class Computing Facility project
How Public Investment in HPC Sparked the AI Boom
New Heights: The U.S. NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility and Horizon
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