05/23/2005     Faith Singer-Villalobos

The University of Texas Board of Regents on May 11 approved a new "home" for The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and the Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus at The University of Texas at Austin. The facility will provide new offices and a state-of-the-art computer machine room for TACC, and will bring UTIG on the university campus for the first time since its inception in 1972.

Both TACC and UTIG support and conduct leading scientific research for The University of Texas at Austin and to the national academic research community in their areas of expertise. The new facility - a three-story, 90,000 square foot building - will allow the TACC and UTIG research staff to flourish in their commitments to carry out pioneering research at the highest academic standards. The building will be located in the northeast quadrant of the J.J. Pickle Research Campus, adjacent to the Bureau of Economic Geology.

TACC's staff has grown from 14 people to more than 60 staff and students over the past four years, outgrowing its current space. "We project to hire another 50 to 60 staff and students over the next four to five years," said Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. "We also have 100 times more computing power than four years ago - more than 10 teraflops now - and we plan to increase by 10-fold in the next four to five years."

Currently, TACC compute, visualization, storage, network and IT resources are located in a 3,200 square foot machine room in the Commons Building at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus. This machine room houses more than 85 systems, ranging in size from one central processing unit for systems that support IT services, to a 1024 processor compute cluster.

The new building will boast a 6,000 square foot, raised-floor computer machine room that can be expanded to 12,000 square feet. The new, state-of-the-art machine room will accommodate all existing infrastructure with room to grow. The machine room will feature two long glass walls so visitors can view the variety of powerful computing systems in deployment. More than 600 kilowatts of electricity and approximately 250 tons of cooling capacity will support TACC resources transferring to the new facility and allow for future growth. A new scientific visualization laboratory may also become a future expansion option.

More than 600 active, funded research projects are currently benefiting from the high performance computing resources available at TACC. These projects, each conducted by a research team, span multiple disciplines including the natural sciences (chemistry, physics, computer science, geosciences), engineering (biomedical, mechanical, petroleum, aerospace), and business (economic modeling). Sharing this new building with UTIG will grow the relationship between the two organizations, and will foster new research and development in the field of computational geosciences.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will review the building proposal in July. Construction will begin in late August or early September. The estimated completion timeframe is September 2006.