About TACC
The mission of the Texas Advanced Computing Center is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies.
To accomplish this mission, TACC engages in the following activities:
- Evaluates, acquires, and operates leading-edge advanced computing resources, including computing systems and software;
- Supports world-class researchers by offering training workshops, seminars, and academic classes to educate and assist them in learning to use these resources;
- Supports world-class researchers by providing expert consulting and technical documentation to assist them in using these resources effectively;
- Conducts research and development activities to produce new computational techniques and technologies that enhance the capabilities of advanced computing resources;
- Collaborates with computational researchers to apply advanced computational techniques in their research activities;
- Educates the community to increase participation in advanced computing technology careers; and
- Informs society about the value of advanced computing technologies in improving scientific knowledge and quality of life.
TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support users of these resources. Through the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, these resources and services are also made available to the national academic research community.
U.S. academic researchers may apply online for computing resource allocations on TACC systems through TeraGrid. UT Austin researchers can apply through TeraGrid or directly through TACC. Applications are reviewed on a quarterly basis, and allocations are made based on scientific merit, suitability of TACC systems for the proposed work, and overall demand for high performance computing cycles.
Please visit the Resources section of our Website for additional information.
In addition to providing advanced computing infrastructure and support to enable the research efforts of UT Austin, UT System, and TeraGrid users, TACC’s staff conducts research to develop new computing techniques and technologies.
TACC's current areas of interest include:
- Evaluating and modeling the performance characteristics of HPC systems and of algorithms and codes on these systems;
- Exploring the impact of large displays and immersive techniques on data analysis and knowledge discovery;
- Developing new visualization tools for collaborative and remote visualization;
- Building reliable, high-performance commodity clusters for HPC simulations and scientific visualization; and
- Developing computational grid software to seamlessly integrate TACC HPC, scientific visualization, and data storage systems, and to link these systems with systems at partner institutions.
TACC collaborators include researchers affiliated with other UT Austin departments and centers, Texas universities in the High Performance Computing Across Texas Consortium (HiPCAT), TeraGrid institutions, and other U.S. universities and government laboratories.
Please visit the Research & Development section of our Website for additional information.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center is organized into six groups, each with distinct areas of responsibility:
| High Performance Computing | Provides consulting expertise on using HPC resources and develops new tools for using these systems more effectively. Collaborates with external researchers to develop and optimize effective parallel applications. Evaluates new system architectures and software technology. Engages in research to develop novel techniques and algorithms to improve science and engineering application capabilities. Lead: Karl Schulz, Associate Director, High Performance Computing |
| Data & Information Analysis | Operates the ACES VisLab (VisLab) in the Applied Computational Engineering & Sciences (ACES) building. Works with researchers to analyze data. Evaluates new visualization hardware and software. Develops new visualization software, and participates in research in visualization techniques.
Lead: Kelly Gaither, Associate Director Visualization and Data Analysis |
| Distributed & Collaborative Computing | Researches, develops, integrates, and deploys distributed and collaborative computing systems. Collaborates with scientific users to help them use distributed and collaborative systems, and collects user feedback on these systems. Researches and develops Web-based portals and gateways, and distributed systems software. Participants in deploying distributed systems that range in scale from a single campus to a nation. Lead: Jay Boisseau, Director |
| Advanced Computing Systems | Installs and updates operating systems and system-level software on all HPC, SciVis, and storage systems, and the TACC network hardware. Configures systems for maximum effectiveness. Evaluates new systems. Lead: Tommy Minyard, Associate Director, Advanced Computing Systems |
| Center Operations & Administration | Manages the financial, administrative, and operational issues for TACC staff. Coordinates meetings, workshops, and conferences Lead: Janet McCord, Assistant Director |
| External Relations | Advances the mission of the center by cultivating relationships with individuals, industry, foundations, government agencies, and the media. Drives the center’s externally oriented activities, including industrial and international partners, media relations, and special events. Attempts to broaden the awareness of HPC issues at the K-12 level and within the public through the development and implementation of education and outreach programs. Lead: Melyssa Fratkin, External Relations Manager |
| User Support | Manages center-wide user support activities, including daily consulting support, user documentation, user training, and communicating user and staff accomplishments to the community at large. Lead: Chris Hempel, Associate Director, Resources & Services |
Please reference TACC in any research report, journal or publication that requires citation of any author's work. The recognition of the TACC resources you used to perform research is important for acquiring funding for the next generation hardware, support services, and our Research & Development activities in HPC, visualization, data storage, and grid infrastructure. The minimal content of a citation should include:
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
The University of Texas at Austin
Our suggested acknowledgement is:
The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing {HPC, visualization, database, or grid} resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. URL: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu
Select one or more of the items within the braces, {}.
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