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Read more: New Lonestar Supercomputer Expands UNT Computing Capabilities
With a new collaboration and National Science Foundation grant, UNT creates additional high-performance computing resources to exponentially increase research potential.
To support the increasing demands of advanced computing in scientific research, UNT and the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center signed a memorandum of understanding in spring 2021 to provide access to enhanced cyberinfrastructure resources for UNT researchers.
“This new collaboration will have extra-ordinary long-term impacts for research at UNT,” says Mark McLellan, vice president of UNT’s Division of Research and Innovation. “It creates exciting opportunities for inno-vative and impactful research outcomes to address a range of global challenges.”
Designing, deploying and maintaining the computing systems necessary for the ever-increasing range of modern research efforts is expensive, highly specialized and time intensive, which is why many organizations employ supplemental resources outside their organization. The Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin has developed some of the world’s most powerful computer resources, including Frontera, the ninth-fastest supercomputer in the world.
“This partnership will give our researchers access to a broad range of computational technologies that would be difficult to provide on our own,” says Chris McCoy, chief information officer for UNT and the UNT System. “As the world increasingly moves toward cloud-based solutions, this aligns well with providing reliable, secure and scalable computing.”
Under the agreement, UNT faculty and students will have access to TACC’s high-performance computing systems under the same conditions as any faculty member at UT Austin.
Additionally, an interdisciplinary team of professors in UNT’s Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Modeling — including Oliviero Andreussi (physics), Thomas Cundari (chemistry), Jincheng Du (materials science and engineering) and Hao Yan (chemistry) — received a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant to upgrade the high-performance computing system in the Chemistry Building. This new award is the latest in a series of four major NSF grants that have helped to grow the system, which serves as a major research asset to UNT.