The Vista supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas is in full production and has been made available to the open science community.

The AI cluster was first announced in January 2024 and is one of the largest of its kind in academia.

Funded by the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF), Vista serves as a bridge between the university’s 23.52 petaflops Frontera supercomputer and the forthcoming Horizon system; planned for 2026 and expected to provide a 100x increase in AI performance over Frontera.

The air-cooled Vista cluster is comprised of two main components, one consisting of 72 Nvidia Grace Hopper GH200 nodes and a second which is made up of 144 Nvidia Grace Superchip nodes, giving it 4.1 petaflops of CPU and 40.8 petaflops of GPU performance.

The compute nodes and the filesystem are connected with Nvidia NDR Infiniband, providing up to 400 Gbps bandwidth.

The cluster will be used by the open science community to develop and apply generative AI solutions across sectors that include biosciences and health care, focusing on computer vision and natural language processing.

“Vista expands TACC’s capacity for AI and will ensure that the broad science, engineering, and education research communities have access to the most advanced computing and AI technologies,” said Dan Stanzione, TACC executive director and associate vice president.

Adam Klivans, computer science professor and member of the scientific board for the Center for Generative AI, added: “The speeds are well beyond what we have experienced on other advanced systems at TACC. This cluster will be a game-changer for the AI community at UT Austin.”

In addition to Frontera and Vista, the TACC is also home to the Stallion supercomputer and the Lonestar6 cluster, which was deployed in 2021.

In late August 2024, TACC announced it had chosen Sabey Data Centers as its colocation partner for the Horizon supercomputer. The system will be hosted at Sabey’s Austin facility, SDC Austin, in Texas.