Vista: A Bridge Between Frontera and Horizon

New supercomputer to unlock the full potential of AI for scientific community

TACC is pleased to announce Vista, a new AI-centric system for the open science community.

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Vista marks a departure from the x86-based architecture used by TACC in Frontera and the Stampede systems to central processing units (CPUs) based on the Advanced RISC Machines (Arm) architecture. The Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip is specifically designed for the rapidly expanding needs of AI and scientific computing.

“Vista serves as a bridge between Frontera, the current NSF leadership-class computing system, and Horizon, which will be the primary system of the U.S. NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility, planned for 2026,” said TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione. “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.”

Additionally, Vista includes the NVIDIA Grace Hopper GH200 combination of the Grace CPU tightly integrated with NVIDIA’s graphics processing unit (GPU) for the heavy computational lifting required by scientific and AI workloads.

“It was very satisfying for our team to train extremely large neural networks on Vista during the early user period, especially recent foundation models from computer vision, natural language processing, and computational biology,” said Adam Klivans, computer science professor and scientific board member for the Center for Generative AI at UT Austin. “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.”

Vista will help users begin porting to future generations of these technologies.

“Now with Vista, along with Lonestar6, our AMD-based system, and Stampede3, our Intel-based system, our users will gain experience with and insight into three major architectural paths for what Horizon might look like,” Stanzione said.

The Grace Hopper Superchip is the processor for the majority of Vista’s compute nodes. The Grace CPU Superchip, which contains two Grace CPUs in a single module, fills out the remainder of Vista’s nodes for conventional applications.

Memory is implemented in a new way with the superchips. Instead of traditional DDR DRAM, the Grace CPU Superchip uses LPDDR5 technology like the memory used in laptops, but optimized for the needs of the data center. In addition to delivering higher bandwidth, this memory is more power-efficient than traditional dual inline memory modules. When combined with a high performance and energy efficient CPU design, the energy savings can be more than 200 watts per node.

On the storage side, TACC has partnered with VAST Data to supply Vista’s file system with all-flash, high-performance storage.

Vista allocations are available to the open science community through the Frontera project and the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot project.