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The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is a research center at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) reporting to the Office of the Vice President for Research. TACC provides advanced computing resources and services to enable computationally intensive research and conducts research and development to enhance the capabilities of these resources.

The mission of the Texas Advanced Computing Center is to enable scientific discovery and enhance society through the application of advanced computing technologies.

To accomplish this mission, TACC engages in the following activities:

• Evaluates, acquires, and operates leading-edge advanced computing resources, including computing systems and software;
• Supports world-class researchers by offering training workshops, seminars, and academic classes to educate and assist them in learning to use these resources;
• Supports world-class researchers by providing expert consulting and technical documentation to assist them in using these resources effectively;
• Conducts research and development activities to produce new computational techniques and technologies that enhance the capabilities of advanced computing resources;
• Collaborates with computational researchers to apply advanced computational techniques in their research activities;
• Educates the community to increase participation in advanced computing technology careers; and
• Informs society about the value of advanced computing technologies in improving scientific knowledge and quality of life.

TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support users of these resources. Through the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, these resources and services are also made available to the national academic research community.

U.S. academic researchers may apply online for computing resource allocations on TACC systems through TeraGrid. UT Austin researchers can apply through TeraGrid or directly through TACC. Applications are reviewed on a quarterly basis, and allocations are made based on scientific merit, suitability of TACC systems for the proposed work, and overall demand for high performance computing cycles.

In addition to providing advanced computing infrastructure and support to enable the research efforts of UT Austin, UT System, and TeraGrid users, TACC’s staff conducts research to develop new computing techniques and technologies.

TACC's current areas of interest include:

• Evaluating and modeling the performance characteristics of HPC systems and of algorithms and codes on these systems;
• Exploring the impact of large displays and immersive techniques on data analysis and knowledge discovery;
• Developing new visualization tools for collaborative and remote visualization;
• Building reliable, high-performance commodity clusters for HPC simulations and scientific visualization; and
• Developing computational grid software to seamlessly integrate TACC HPC, scientific visualization, and data storage systems, and to link these systems with systems at partner institutions.

TACC collaborators include researchers affiliated with other UT Austin departments and centers, Texas universities in the High Performance Computing Across Texas Consortium (HiPCAT), TeraGrid institutions, and other U.S. universities and government laboratories.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center is organized into six groups, each with distinct areas of responsibility: