Preparing Frontera for Texascale Days

Abstract

Recently, the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin held its third Texascale Days event on Frontera. Frontera is the most powerful academic supercomputer in the U.S. This tightly connected system allows experienced users with sophisticated parallel applications to run across thousands of cores. Frontera offers a unique opportunity for National Science Foundation researchers. Texascale Days provides researchers the opportunity to execute half- to full-system runs. Events such as Texascale Days allow our colleagues to experiment outside their regular workflow and push their applications and our systems to the limit. The issues we encounter and overcome provide insight on how to better deploy our systems and support their research. These events are stepping stones to the science problems of tomorrow and the HPC resources required to investigate them. Here, we describe the effort required to offer the Texascale Days opportunity to our researchers.