USA · operational · hpc

Frontera

Operated by Texas Advanced Computing Center at Texas Advanced Computing Center .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 23.52 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 38.75 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 60.7%
Cores: 448,448
Power: -
Per watt: - GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- Dell PowerEdge C6420	Dell Technologies DELLNYSE	-	Reported	tacc.utexas.edu tacc.utexas.edu
CPU	Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs x86-64 · 28C · 2.7 GHz · 14 nm · 205 W Xeon Platinum 8280 28C 2.7GHz	Intel INTCNASDAQ	-	Reported	tacc.utexas.edu tacc.utexas.edu
Interconnect	NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR Interconnect Fat tree or dragonfly+ · 200 Gb/s per port · About 0.6 microseconds Mellanox HDR Infiniband	NVIDIA NVDANASDAQ	-	Reported	tacc.utexas.edu tacc.utexas.edu
Cooling	Direct-to-chip cold plate Cooling Cold plate on the package, air for the remainder · Removes roughly 50-80 percent of node heat to liquid novel cooling systems from CoolIT, Cooltera	Dell Technologies DELLNYSE	-	Reported	eurekalert.org
Cooling	Single-phase immersion Cooling Full submersion in a dielectric bath · 100 kW per tank and above GPU subsystem immersed in a tank of liquid coolant from GRC	Dell Technologies DELLNYSE	-	Verified	datacenterfrontier.com eurekalert.org
Operating system	Red Hat Enterprise Linux Operating systems Linux distribution · Open source, commercial support subscription Red Hat Enterprise Linux	Red Hat IBMNYSE rolls up to IBM	-	Reported	tacc.utexas.edu tacc.utexas.edu

The read

The largest academic system in the United States at its debut, built from Dell PowerEdge nodes on Mellanox HDR InfiniBand. Its supply chain is entirely merchant - no custom silicon, no proprietary fabric - which is what makes it a good baseline against the national-laboratory machines that surround it in these tables.

Timeline

2018 Announced source
2019-06 List debut at #5 (June 2019) source
2019-06 First operational source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#5: TOP500, June 2019 →

Site & facility

Texas Advanced Computing Center

Location: Austin, TX, USA
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling
Commissioned: 2007

tacc.utexas.edu

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
tacc.utexas.edu	names system only	-
tacc.utexas.edu	names system and part	Intel Xeon Platinum 8280, NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR

Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.

Related news

2025-11-17 Dell and NVIDIA detail Horizon, the NSF's Frontera successor at TACC · Dell Technologies
Horizon pairs unreleased NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera parts with Dell's direct liquid cooled IRSS racks and Quantum-X800 InfiniBand, targeted at roughly 10x Frontera's simulation throughput. NSF funding uncertainty flagged earlier in 2025 did not stop the build, and early user access is slated for spring 2026, which is worth checking against whatever actually ships.

All news →