Introduction to Frontera
Steve Lantz, Peter Vaillancourt
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
Revisions: 4/2024, 9/2021, 5/2021, 8/2020 (original)
Frontera is the largest academic supercomputer in the world. It premiered at #5 in the TOP500 list in June 2019, and as of June 2021 retains a predominant spot at #10. Located at The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Frontera is a state-of-the-art High Performance Computing HPC system which entered full production in 2019 at 39 petaflops peak performance. Some differentiating features include integrated cloud services, container support, and a GPU subsystem. Frontera access can be requested by submitting an allocation request to TACC. However, unlike other large TACC systems which are designed to handle a variety of workload sizes, Frontera is tailored towards the very largest of scientific computing projects.
Objectives
After you complete this topic, you should be able to:
- Explain the functions of nodes in the Frontera architecture
- Identify key distinctions between Frontera and Stampede2
- Discuss the function of the SSH command
- Distinguish among Frontera allocation tracks
Prerequisites
Frontera is a leadership-class system, so its prospective users are already likely to have a high degree of familiarity and experience with HPC and parallel computing. The pace of this presentation is meant to be relatively brisk, for that reason.
With that being understood, there are no formal prerequisites for this Virtual Workshop topic. A working knowledge of Linux is recommended; if you need more preparation in Linux, try working through the Linux roadmap first.