The following tables compare the compute nodes on Vista to older nodes on Frontera, another HPC resource at TACC. Both systems are supported by the National Science Foundation, and both are intended to enable large-scale computational research in a wide variety of fields. But as mentioned, Vista is designed to be a bridge to the next leadership-class compute facility; therefore, as one might expect, its NVIDIA Grace processors have overall better individual capabilities than those in Frontera. The bigger contrast, though, comes in the sheer number of processors: size is what really what distinguishes Frontera as a leadership-class computer system. The table below emphasizes the numbers and key properties of compute nodes found in each system.

The first table below emphasizes the numbers and key properties of CPUs found in representative CPU compute nodes of each system.

The second table compares the GPUs found in the GPU compute nodes in the same three systems. Because NVIDIA GPU architectures have advanced significantly across generations, some precision types and features are only available on newer hardware, as indicated by N/A entries and in the notes. All performance values are per GPU.

¹ Vista User Guide: System Architecture, NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip, and NVIDIA Grace Hopper GH200 Superchip datasheet. Note, the GB200 model in Vista has the H100 GPU. NVIDIA also makes a GB200 model with the H200 GPU, which has identical specs except for memory (the H100 has HBM3, the H200 has HBM3e). Vista also includes some GB200 NVL4 nodes with Blackwell GPUs.
² Frontera User Guide: System Architecture and NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 specifications.
³ Frontera did not have hyperthreading enabled, and Vista's Grace processors are not capable of it.
⁴ Max Turbo applies when only 1 core is active; the Turbo Boost rate declines if more cores are active and/or AVX instructions are used.
⁵ Tensor Core performance values for FP8, INT8, and FP16/BF16 rows include the effect of structured sparsity, which can double throughput over dense operation for eligible workloads. The Quadro RTX 5000 (Turing) does not support structured sparsity, nor does it support BF16 in its tensor cores. Hopper does not support FP6.
⁶ FP64 performance is not listed in the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 datasheet; the value is estimated from the Turing architecture's characteristic 1/32 FP64-to-FP32 ratio.
⁷ The Quadro RTX 5000's NVLink is an optional workstation add-on for connecting two cards and is not a datacenter-grade interconnect comparable to the NVLink on Vista.