A new supercomputer called Stampede that publicly launched Jan. 7 at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin is considered one of the world's fastest and most advanced of its kind.

Located in the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Stampede will be used for research in fields such as biology, astronomy, climate and weather prediction, engineering, education and technology, TACC Director Jay Boisseau said. TACC's purpose is to help facilitate discoveries that advance science and society through applying computational technologies.

"Stampede will [also] be used to help train the next generation of researchers in advanced computational science and technology, expanding the use of advanced computing across disciplines and into new communities and domains," Boisseau said.

The National Science Foundation awarded a grant to the TACC for the construction of Stampede, and 90 percent of the system will be dedicated for use in Extreme Science and the Engineering Discovery Environment, which is a single virtual system that scientists use to share data and computing resources.

The remaining 10 percent of the system will be used for other open science research projects. Open science research consists of grant-funded and peer-reviewed studies in science and engineering fields in which the data is made publicly available.

Staff at the TACC, Dell Inc. and Intel built the system for a total cost of $27.5 million. During the next four years, it will cost more than $50 million to run the system, which is expected to have about 4,000 to 5,000 users, Boisseau said. TACC, Dell, Intel and a team of cyber infrastructure experts at several universities, including The University of Texas, will use the system for technical operations.

"Stampede is going to revolutionize the way we do computational science," said Omar Ghattas, a UT professor of geological sciences and mechanical engineering. He is also the director of the Center for Computational Geosciences at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

Before Stampede was launched to the open science community, Ghattas was one of the first scientists to use the system.

"I would almost bet it's the largest university-based supercomputer in the world," he said.

His research focuses on understanding the dynamics of the Earth, such as large-scale earthquakes and how the ice flow in Antarctica relates to the rising sea levels. Ghattas said a supercomputer with at least 16 petaflops of computational power is necessary to more accurately and quickly solve equations, speculate future geological changes and better simulate 3-D models.

Stampede has nearly 10 petaflops and is expected to increase to at least 15 petaflops. It can process 10 quadrillion mathematical equations per second. The supercomputer's network is about 10,000 times faster than a typical home or business network, Ghattas said. He said the current iPhone is as fast as a supercomputer was 25 years ago.

In the next few decades, as supercomputers like Stampede continue to become more powerful, Ghattas said scientists will be closer to being able to predict when an earthquake will occur.

By the beginning of March, he said he anticipates all of his research on polar ice sheets in Antarctica currently being done on smaller computers to be transferred to Stampede.