University of Texas to Receive $10 Million in Private Funding for HPC

The Texas Advanced
Computing Center (TACC) has received a commitment of $10 million from the O’Donnell Foundation to
advance data-driven science, also called data-enabled or data-intensive
science.

TACC, a supercomputing center, will
use the funding for new data infrastructure to sustain and broaden in advanced computing and computational science. When
completed, these projects will benefit research in dozens of departments and
labs at the university, especially in the Institute for Computational
Engineering and Sciences (ICES).

The new resources will also augment TACC’s ability to support
research at University of Texas System institutions such as biomedical research
at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Novel data-driven projects such as consumer
energy usage behaviors being studied at Austin’s Pecan Street Inc. will also
benefit, as will major national projects in which the university is a
partner such as the iPlant project, a $50 million National Science Foundation-funded
project to help with plant research, including improving food yields and
producing more effective biofuels.

The new data infrastructure plans include:

• High-performance, petascale data storage system accessible to all of TACC’s
  computing and visualization systems, and expandable to hundreds
  of petabytes in the coming years
• A computational system with embedded high-speed storage that is optimized for
  data-intensive computing, including massive data processing and analysis
• New servers and storage to host innovative Web-based and cloud computing
  services, including science portals and gateways that enable researchers around
  the world to use the university’s research applications.

"For decades, Peter
O’Donnell has been quietly but generously investing in UT Austin,"
said Bill Powers, president of The University of Texas at Austin. "We’re once more humbled by his generosity
and impressed by his expansive vision of Texas as a world leader in science and
technology. The importance of UT’s advanced computing capabilities, embodied by
TACC, will only increase over time. We have every reason to believe that
Peter’s wisdom will be borne out by ever more dramatic research successes. And
as advanced computing enables more sophisticated research across all of the
sciences, an investment of this kind is among the most strategic any
philanthropist or granting institution could make. It also has the significant
side-benefit of attracting even more faculty talent to Texas."

Peter O’Donnell said: "Dr. Jay
Boisseau and his staff have built several of the top high-performance systems
in the world. TACC’s new data infrastructure will speed up discoveries in
critical areas including cell biology, imaging, astronomy and nano-engineering.
Under Jay’s leadership, TACC has become a strong value-creator for Texas."

Data-driven science is a new mode of computational science emerging alongside
modeling and simulation. Vast amounts of digital data are being collected by
new generations of digital instruments – such as gene sequencers, electron
microscopes, satellite-based imagers and distributed sensor networks – that can
be mined for scientific insights.

"Having large amounts of
accurate data enables us to make inferences, correlations and even predictions
where theoretical foundations – mathematical governing equations and models –
are not yet derived," said TACC Director Jay Boisseau. "Collecting digital data is increasingly
cheap and easy. We need digital infrastructure that helps people manage it and
make sense of it."

The O’Donnell Foundation has already contributed $6 million of the commitment
to The University of Texas at Austin and will provide $2 million more in each
of the next two years. The university will also provide an additional $2
million over five years to hire new technology professionals at TACC, who will
support and accelerate new research in ICES and other university programs that
leverage these data resources.

Some of the researchers across the state
who will be helped
by TACC’s expanded capacity:

• Bioinformatics: Nobel Laureate
  Bruce Beutler, Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at UT Southwestern
  Medical Center, and his group are using random mutagenesis to dissect innate immunity,
  the first step in the body’s immune response. They sequence the whole genomes
  of mice with immune deficiencies and then search for the causative mutations by
  computational comparisons between mutant and wild-type strains, analyzing
  trillions of nucleotides (units of inheritance) per month to find ‘needles in
  haystacks.’
• Neuroscience: The Assistant Professor
  Alison Preston, Department of Psychology and Section of Neurobiology, The
  University of Texas at Austin, focuses on understanding how predictive
  memory operates in the human brain using functional brain imaging techniques.
  The data-intensive infrastructure at TACC will enable Preston and her trainees
  to increase the speed at which they analyze the complex patterns of brain
  responses and how they relate to behavior, substantially increasing the rate of
  scientific discovery.
• Structural Biology: Professor Ron Elber, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry,
  Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), The University of
  Texas at Austin, and
  his group are using computationally generated models of protein complexes and
  comparing them to experimentally determined structures. They exploit these
  comparisons to build predictive tools of protein assembly.
• Astrophysics: Professor Karl Gebhardt, 2012 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in
  Science, Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin and his team have
  designed an observing program to understand the accelerated expansion of the
  universe. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will
  observe more than a million galaxies during a three-year observing campaign and
  make the largest map of the universe in order to trace out its expansion in
  detail. TACC provides a vital resource as the survey will generate a petabyte
  of data and require substantial computing power.
• Energy: Brewster McCracken, Executive Director, Pecan Street Inc., a
  research and development organization focused on applying and testing advanced
  technology, is involved in new business models and customer behavior to better understand the
  potential of smart grids. Data-intensive computing is used as a large-scale
  response to data hosting, novel visualizations and data portal opportunities.
• Plant Biology: Dan Stanzione, Co-Director for Infrastructure, iPlant Collaborative, works on Gene sequencing and
  high-resolution imaging technologies that require significant computer power. The
  iPlant Collaborative builds advanced cyberinfrastructure for researchers and
  developers to take advantage of the deluge of biological data to help
  solve the world’s growing food challenges.
• Social Science: Kent Norsworthy, Latin American Government Documents Archive
  (LAGDA), The University of Texas at Austin, heads the LAGDA project seeks
  to preserve and provide access to ministerial and presidential documents from
  18 Latin American and Caribbean countries. LAGDA is composed of approximately
  66.6 million documents archived from the Internet, totaling 5.6 terabytes of
  data. The current effort is to apply mining algorithms with
  cloud computing to facilitate the automatic classification of and access to
  this collection.