Intel Corp. and The University of Texas at Austin today dedicated Frontera, a new supercomputer ranked as the fastest of its kind that will support research in areas such as gravitational wave astronomy.

Frontera is the most powerful computer in the academic world with a peak performance of 38.75 petaflops. A single petaflop equals a quadrillion calculations per second.

The system is housed at UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center next to Stampede2. That’s a smaller supercomputer commissioned in 2017 that previously served as the lab’s main workhorse.

Like Stampede2, Frontera mostly uses Intel silicon under the hood. The system comprises of 8,080 Dell EMC PowerEdge servers each equipped with two of the chipmaker’s high-end Xeon SP 8280 central processing units. Each individual CPU in turn has 28 processing cores, which adds up to nearly 450,000 cores across the entire Frontera server fleet.

The supercomputer has specially configured sections for niche tasks. There are 50 servers loaded with Intel’s Optane DC memory, an alternative to flash storage that offers significantly higher performance in most areas. As of last month, researchers were also planning to add 90 servers running Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units that will support workloads such as molecular dynamics simulations and artificial intelligence software.

What’s notable about those latter machines is that they don’t use server-grade GPUs. Instead, UT Austin decided to go with the more affordable Nvidia Quadro 5000 RTX workstation cards, which lack some of the advanced features in the chipmaker’s data center silicon but are sufficient for the applications the university has in mind.

“Frontera will address a narrower mission than Stampede2,” said Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “Instead of supporting thousands of projects, we’ll have a few hundred that have an extraordinary computational need and massive scale of computation. We think, in terms of real science throughput, we’ll get three or four times the performance of its predecessor.”

Scientists have already started making use of Frontera in research projects. Manuela Campanelli, an astrophysics professor with the Rochester Institute of Technology, is developing a simulation meant to shed more light on the phenomenon of gravitational waves. Peter Kasson of the University of Virginia is using Frontera’s computing power to study emerging viruses and antiviral therapies. 

Photo: Intel