Artificial intelligence is not only a leading driver of the U.S. economy, it is spurring scientific discoveries in fields such as medicine, protein design, materials science, hurricane modeling and more.
Through a series of academic courses, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is preparing students to work with AI and other leading technologies in an evolving computational landscape.
Over the last two decades, TACC has hosted a diverse portfolio of National Science Foundation-funded supercomputers for academic research to transform how researchers compute, discover, and innovate including:
- Horizon: The NSF Leadership-Class Facility system launching in 2026
- Ranch: Also part of the NSF LCCF, Ranch is the largest academic data storage system in the nation
- Frontera: The fastest academic supercomputer in the U.S.
- Vista: Optimized for AI workloads
- Lonestar6: Serving UT System via the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure Portal (UTRC)
- Stampede3: A scientific workhorse supporting thousands of U.S. researchers
- Jetstream2: A flexible cloud-based computing resource
“We’re not only here to build big computers, but to make sure people use them well,” said Dan Stanzione, associate vice president for research at UT Austin and executive director of TACC. “One great way to do this is by teaching students on our campus, as part of their formal education, the methods of large-scale computational science.”
This includes offering academic courses for graduate students at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Science and for undergraduates in the Computational Engineering program through the Cockrell School of Engineering. Examples of courses include Tools and Techniques of Computational Science, which provides a foundation of the hardware principles, programming languages and operating system environment for getting the best performance out of supercomputers. The Software Design for Responsible Intelligent Systems course provides a deep dive into designing, implementing, validating and operating real-world intelligent systems using scalable data analysis and modern machine-learning techniques.
Read the full story on the TACC website to learn more about more TACC academic courses, its instructors and future course topics they plan explore.