AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has launched a powerful new supercomputer that will enable dynamic open science research projects in the U.S. For over a decade, the Stampede systems — Stampede (2012), Stampede2 (2017) and now Stampede3 (2024) — have been flagships in the National Science Foundation’s scientific supercomputing ecosystem. A $10 million award from the NSF has made Stampede3 possible, which will facilitate computational and data-driven science and engineering research and education.
“During our pre-production period, users experienced capabilities such as an increase in speed-up for scientific applications due to better memory bandwidth per core provided by the Intel Xeon CPU Max processors,” said Tommy Minyard, TACC’s director of Advanced Computing Systems and principal investigator of the Stampede3 project. “And for the first time, we are using a storage system with no spinning disk — we are expecting a significant improvement for users in their I/O performance and reliability.”
TACC continues its partnerships with Dell Technologies and Intel on Stampede3, a nearly 10 petaflop system offering tremendous capability for diverse scientific applications. It offers substantial new computing capability while also re-purposing hardware from previous NSF investments to support high-throughput users.
"Stampede3 brings a significant increase in computational and data capabilities to the science and engineering research community,” said Katie Antypas, office director for the NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. “The new high-bandwidth memory node architecture as well as the all-flash filesystem will accelerate a wide range of applications, and I expect it will be in high demand by the user community.”
During its pre-production period, more than 450 distinct users ran half a million jobs. The system will enable thousands of researchers nationwide to investigate questions that require advanced computing power ranging from data analysis in biology to supersonic turbulence flows to atomistic simulations on a wide range of materials.
A few of the early users and projects include: The Galaxy project in biology, which provides a unique, freely available, high-performance data analysis environment serving the full range of questions related to biology and other disciplines. Fluid Dynamics by Diego Donzis at Texas A&M University, aiming to understand turbulent flows at both low and high speeds by performing incompressible and compressible simulations at massive scales with unbounded and wall-bounded flows. Industrial Chemistry and Materials Science by Qi Liang at the University of Michigan, supporting the development of a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation method to study the long-time evaluation of solute atoms into solute clusters based on surrogate models.
TACC also added an experimental GPU hardware subsystem for artificial intelligence and machine learning, further advancing the University’s Year of AI initiative and highlighting the AI data processing capabilities available only at UT.
Stampede3 delivers a new 4 petaflop capability for high-end simulation, a new graphics processing unit/AI subsystem, reintegration of 224 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor nodes for higher memory applications, legacy hardware to support throughput computing, VAST Data — 10PB usable all flash storage system capable of 50GB/s write, 500GB/s read bandwidth, the new Cornelis Networks CN5000 Omni-Path™ highly scalable 400Gb/s network interconnect to enable low latency, excellent scalability for applications, and high connectivity to the I/O subsystem (to be deployed later in 2024), along with over 2,000 compute nodes with almost 200,000 cores.
Stampede3 will serve the open science community from 2024 through 2029.