TACC’s Horizon Starts Early Operations with 4,000 Blackwell GPUs as NSF Backs $400 Million Facility
Updated
Updated · HPCwire · Jul 7
TACC’s Horizon Starts Early Operations with 4,000 Blackwell GPUs as NSF Backs $400 Million Facility
1 articles · Updated · HPCwire · Jul 7
Summary
Horizon has entered the first of two deployment phases at TACC, with GPU racks now operational and broader early access for the research community set to begin soon.
4,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and 2,000 Grace CPUs form the initial system, linked by 800 GB/sec InfiniBand and 400 petaflops of storage; TACC says applications should run 15-20 times faster than on Frontera, and some AI workloads 100 times faster.
11 Characteristic Science Applications helped shape the machine and are serving as early acceptance tests, with teams in astrophysics, quantum materials, particle physics, biophysics and earthquake modeling already validating code on Vista and Horizon test nodes.
The CPU phase — adding 8,000 NVIDIA Vera CPUs — is due in winter 2026 or early 2027, while the Ranch archive already provides 1 exabyte of capacity.
NSF says the more than $400 million leadership-class facility is meant to replace aging systems and support major U.S. science programs including Rubin Observatory, LIGO, NRAO and EarthScope.
With corporations building vast AI clouds, what is the unique scientific mission for a public supercomputer like Horizon?
Will Horizon's power enable new kinds of science, or just accelerate answers to today's research questions?
How will Horizon's extreme power and cooling designs influence the future of sustainable data centers globally?
Horizon Supercomputer Launches in 2026: NSF’s $500M Leadership-Class Facility Delivers 10x Simulation and 100x AI Power for Open Science
Overview
On July 7, 2026, the U.S. National Science Foundation officially launched Horizon, its new Leadership-Class Computing Facility, which is now operational. Horizon provides researchers with unprecedented capabilities and is poised to revolutionize scientific and technological development across the nation. Its immediate impact is expected to be profound, especially in artificial intelligence, as it offers a robust platform for large-scale AI computations. By dramatically accelerating scientific discovery in the age of AI, Horizon is set to open new frontiers in research and enable breakthroughs far beyond current imagination.