Lonestar Dedication Ceremony at TACC
Pickle Research Campus
October 19, 2006
Thank you, Dr. Boisseau. It is a pleasure to join you in the company of so many distinguished friends and supporters of the Texas Advanced Computing Center [TACC] – Senator Jeff Wentworth, Representative Mark Strama, Chancellor Mark Yudof, Michael Dell, Peter O'Donnell and Carolyn Bacon of the O'Donnell Foundation, and other guests.
This is a great occasion for TACC and The University of Texas at Austin. We are very proud to house and maintain the supercomputer “Lonestar” and make it accessible to our state and national scientific communities. And we are pleased to announce that Lonestar is now the most powerful system on the TeraGrid – the leading open scientific discovery infrastructure in the country. As a result, researchers across the United States can now access this remarkable system.
Over the past several years, TACC has become a leading academic high performance computing center, enabling groundbreaking research to take place across disciplines at our university.
High performance computing plays a pivotal role in academic research, giving researchers the opportunity to conduct experiments that would otherwise be impossible. For example, studying the dynamics of the Earth's climate in the distant past, investigating how the universe developed, or discovering how complex biological molecules mediate the processes that sustain life.
The computing power of Lonestar will allow TACC to serve even more researchers and help them to grapple with ever greater challenges using advanced computational science.
Lonestar will bring new faculty to our campus, and they will engage in cutting-edge research with the help of TACC's systems and expertise. TACC has already been active in recruiting several leading researchers to UT Austin, including Omar Ghattas, Keshav Pingali, John Chelikowsky, and Bjorn Enquist. We are honored that they are here as our colleagues – and contributing to world-class research.
What Lonestar ultimately provides for UT, the University of Texas System, our state, and the scientific world is access to an advanced instrument that can test, analyze, and validate like few other instruments can. We are grateful to Michael Dell and our partners at Dell for providing the hardware that TACC used to build Lonestar. And we thank Jay Boisseau and his colleagues at TACC for leading us to this great moment in the history of The University of Texas. Thank you all.
