Introduction to Horizon
Zilu Wang, Steve Lantz
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
10/2026 (original)
Horizon is the flagship of the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF), provided through The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). It is intended to be the largest academic supercomputer that is available for open research in the United States. Horizon, like its precursor Vista, is targeted towards scientific computing projects that require highly capable resources for AI and other HPC applications. It accordingly features NVIDIA "superchips" that closely couple CPUs with GPUs.
This topic describes Horizon's architecture and hardware components, then tells you how to establish a connection to the system. The process for submitting an allocation request is also outlined in this topic.
Objectives
After you complete this topic, you should be able to:
- Explain the functions of nodes in the Horizon architecture
- Identify key distinctions between Horizon and Frontera
- Connect to Horizon using the SSH command
- Locate the correct website for requesting a Horizon allocation
Prerequisites
Horizon is the centerpiece of the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility at TACC, 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 roadmap is meant to be relatively brisk, for that reason.
With that being understood, there are no formal prerequisites for this Virtual Workshop roadmap. A working knowledge of Linux is recommended; if you need more preparation in Linux, try working through the Linux roadmap first.
CVW material development is supported by NSF OAC awards 1854828, 2321040, 2323116 (UT Austin) and 2005506 (Indiana University)