Stampede 2: The Next Generation of Petascale Computing for Science and Engineering

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin will acquire and deploy Stampede 2, a new, nearly 20 petaflop High Performance Computing (HPC) system. This system will be available to and accessed by thousands of researchers across the country. It will enable new computational and data-driven scientific and engineering, research and educational discoveries and advances. As a national resource, Stampede 2 will replace and surpass the current highly successful Stampede system. The new system will deliver over twice the overall performance as the current system in many dimensions most important to scientific computing, including computing capability, storage capacity, and network bandwidth. TACC and its academic partners will team with Dell, Inc. and Intel Corp. to procure and provide this system.  HPC is intrinsic to discovery across the science and engineering disciplines served by the NSF. This resource allows researchers to explore those scientific and engineer frontiers that require very large scale computations not otherwise possible. Over the life of Stampede 2, the system is expected to serve many thousands of researchers spanning all NSF-supported disciplines, as the current system has done. In addition to being an immediately productive resource for a large community of computational engineers and scientists, Stampede 2 will also continue the community on an evolutionary path to future "many core" computing technologies.  Stampede 2 will employ upcoming generations of Intel's Xeon and Xeon Phi processors, as well as the Intel Omni-Path network fabric. The system will maintain a familiar Linux-based software environment to insure a smooth migration of the large existing user base to the new system. The system and its software stack will be designed to support traditional large scale simulation users, users performing data intensive computations, as well as emerging classes of new and non-traditional users to high performance computing. Stampede 2 will support breakthrough discoveries and advances across a wide range of research topics.