Event: “What is Computed Here Changes the World: The Stampede Supercomputing System” with Dr. Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
When: 5:45 p.m., Tuesday, March 5. This event is free and open to the public.
Where: ATandT Conference Center Amphitheater (Room 204), 1900 University Ave.
Website: http://www.austinforum.org
Background: If it’s up to Jay Boisseau, the director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and a leader in the national open science community, Austin will be “the supercomputing capital of the world,” along with its reigning title of “live music capital of the world.”
Named with typical Texas bravado, Stampede, the newest supercomputer at UT Austin, will contain more than 500,000 processing cores and will fill a machine room about one-quarter the size of a football field. If you laid out the cables connecting the computing racks, they would reach from Austin to San Antonio. Fully operational since Jan. 7, Stampede is one of the most powerful systems on the planet (it was seventh in the November global Top 500 list with less than half the system built), capable of performing 10 quadrillion mathematical operations a second that’s 1 million,
multiplied by 1 million, multiplied by 10,000.
Stampede is currently the largest system available to scientists across the United States, thousands of whom will use the supercomputer during its four-year lifespan to conduct scientific research and
make discoveries as diverse as isolating new drug compounds, modeling the effects of global climate change, searching for gravitational waves and developing more efficient energy resources.
Boisseau created TACC in 2001, and under his leadership the center has grown into one of the leading advanced computing centers in the world. TACC develops, deploys and operates powerful high-performance computing, scientific visualization and data storage technologies for scientific research. As director, Boisseau provides the vision and strategy that guide the overall resources and services, research and development, and education and outreach programs of the center. He was recognized for his contributions to the growth in supercomputing and computational science at The University of Texas with the UT Presidential Citation in 2012.
