University of Texas is Getting a $60 Million Supercomputer (cnet.com)

The University of Texas at Austin, will soon be home to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. From a report: The National Science Foundation awarded a $60 million grant to the school's Texas Advanced Computing Center, UT Austin and NSF said Wednesday. The supercomputer, named Frontera, is set to become operational roughly a year from now in 2019, and will be "among the most powerful in the world," according to a statement. To be exact, it will be the fifth most powerful in the world, third most powerful in the US, and the most powerful at a university.

Comments

Supercomputers don't excite me anymore

[ZorinLynx]

Back in the day, supercomputers used to be about cutting edge system architecture, making CPUs as absolutely fast as possible, and even shortening connecting wires in the system to squeeze every last bit of performance out of a system. Think back to the Cray systems and such.

These days, supercomputers are just about who can spend the most money to build the biggest data center and buy the largest number of generic blade servers. It's just not interesting anymore; whoever can spend the most money will have the fastest system simply because they can buy the most blades.

What can a user access?

[johnpagenola]

My university got a "supercomputer" and I got excited about what I could do with all of its capabilities. Then I started submitting jobs in batch that were limited to 64gb of ram. I could request 128gb batch machines which would take hours to become available and the maximum machines were 256gb which would sometimes take days to get. Storage was limited to 1TB. Of course I didn't have the permissions to install software so it was an endless hassle to request installation of new versions. So I went back to my own dual E5-2667v2 processors ($590 for both) and 96gb of ram. My z620 is no supercomputer, but it is better than my share of the supercomputer.

Re:What can a user access?

[jellomizer]

Well more to the question, What is the university using the supercomputer for? Is it just 60 million dollar bragging rights, or did they get some grants for research project(s) that can cover the cost that could have effects to make it worth the cost?

Using a Supercomputer for a Shared system is general a waste of money, and you are better off with just a server farm, or (gasp) a cloud service (which is a server farm hosted remotely). However if there is a project that really is utilizing the full computer then a Super Computer is needed.