The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) designed the Stampede supercomputing system to be one of the most powerful production clusters in the world—and added an innovative new technology, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, to add even more computational power. However, Stampede was designed for more than raw performance: it presents a comprehensive science environment to researchers, with a variety of integrated capabilities. Both its scale and its comprehensive capabilities benefit from the continuing advances of x86/Linux cluster technologies, and have helped make Stampede the most widely used petascale computing system in the world. This presentation will present the design decisions that went into Stampede, discuss the deployment challenges leading up to production, and showcase many of the research projects in the ‘stampede of science’ now being enabled by this world-class cluster.
