Introduction to Vista
Zilu Wang, Steve Lantz
Cornell Center for Advanced Computing
12/2025 (original)
Vista is the forerunner to Horizon, which will ultimately be one of the largest academic supercomputers in the world. It is a resource provided through The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), where it serves as a bridge to the NSF's Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF). Vista, like Horizon, 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 Vista'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 Vista architecture
- Identify key distinctions between Vista and Frontera
- Connect to Vista using the SSH command
- Locate the correct website for requesting a Vista allocation
Prerequisites
Vista is intended as a bridge to 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 topic 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.
CVW material development is supported by NSF OAC awards 1854828, 2321040, 2323116 (UT Austin) and 2005506 (Indiana University)