The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has announced it has chosen Sabey Data Centers (SDC Austin) as its colocation partner for the Horizon supercomputer.
Horizon is part of the nation’s newly announced National Science Foundation-funded Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF), which will revolutionise America’s computational research for the next decade.
Horizon will be the largest academic supercomputer dedicated to open-scientific research in the NSF portfolio. It will provide 10x performance improvement over Frontera, the current NSF leadership-class computing system, for simulation and meet the unique scientific requirements of the open science community.
For AI applications, the leap forward will be even larger with Horizon, with more than 100x improvement over Frontera. Horizon will go into operation in 2026.
SDC Austin, located in Round Rock, Texas, is the newest campus in the Sabey portfolio. Upon completion, the campus will have a critical capacity of over 85MW and a footprint of 430,000 square feet. The campus is being built to accommodate high-density deployments, such as those required for AI applications, with low-cost renewable power.
“We are excited to announce Sabey as the home for Horizon and future LCCF systems,” said Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of TACC and Associate Vice President for Research at UT Austin. “We have entered a unique partnership with Sabey to leverage all the advantages of colocation with our very specific needs for cutting-edge, high-density supercomputing.
“The demands of AI have driven the commercial data centre space to look more like supercomputing data centres – liquid cooling, high density and high efficiency. We look forward to an innovative and productive partnership as we venture off campus and work ever more closely with the private sector,” added Stanzione.
“We are thrilled to partner with TACC on Horizon by delivering the robust infrastructure necessary for this groundbreaking supercomputer,” said Mark Noonan, Senior Vice President of Revenue for Sabey Data Centers and UT Austin graduate. “Our innovative design, which integrates both liquid and air cooling, allows us to support the extreme densities that Horizon demands while meeting our sustainability goals.”
The LCCF is a distributed project that will collaborate with four science centres across the country to leverage their deep expertise within the nation’s cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.
Horizon will include a significant investment in specialised accelerators to enable state-of-the-art AI research and more general-purpose processors to support the diverse needs for simulation-based inquiry across all scientific disciplines.
In addition to Horizon, LCCF will provide a range of large-scale data storage systems and interactive computing capabilities.
Beyond the hardware, the project will deploy a wide suite of software and services collectively designed to maximise the utility of LCCF and enable new usage modes for broad classes of applications. Access to the facility will be open to all scientists and engineers nationwide with allocations to the facility determined through open peer-reviewed processes.
