VAST AI Operating System serves as the data infrastructure for TACC’s Horizon – extending a 2+ year strategic partnership that spans Stampede3 and Vista supercomputers
VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announced at SuperComputing 2025 that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has selected the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS) as the data layer for Horizon, the highest-performing academic system in the world and the flagship of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) forthcoming Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF). As the centerpiece of the NSF LCCF, Horizon is a national open-science resource built to broaden access for the U.S. research community.
This announcement expands a strategic collaboration where TACC has relied on VAST across its Stampede3 and Vista supercomputing systems, and will carry that operating model forward to Horizon – expected to be ten times larger than the current largest academic science high performance computing (HPC) system, TACC’s Frontera – to accelerate at-scale simulation, data analytics and AI for tens of thousands of researchers. The joint effort emphasizes AI for scientific innovation, enabling breakthroughs across climate, energy, biomedicine, physics and astrophysics.
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Over the past two years, TACC has leveraged the VAST AI OS across Stampede3 and Vista – systems that have supported more than 15,000 students and researchers, helping translate advanced computing into real-world discoveries for the broader U.S. science community – to simplify how users find, stage and share data. On Stampede3, the VAST delivered 30% faster time-to-results with equivalent clients, scaled to more than ten times the concurrent clients of competing infrastructure, sustained non-disruptive upgrades with no downtime, and achieved 2:1 data reduction to enable a single, tierless data environment. Those outcomes across performance, scale, resiliency and ease of administration informed TACC’s decision to extend the VAST AI OS to Horizon.
“Horizon represents a once-in-a-generation leap for open science, redefining what is possible in scientific computing. As we prepared for the LCCF, we needed a partner that simplifies data at massive scale while matching the performance profile of our next system,” said Dan Stanzione, Executive Director at Texas Advanced Computing Center. “VAST has helped us streamline how we manage and access data across Stampede3 and Vista for more than two years, and we’re excited to extend that approach to Horizon as we unlock faster time-to-results for our researchers – less time moving data, more time running models, training AI, and publishing discoveries.”
VAST AI OS gives Horizon researchers a unified, high-throughput data layer so researchers can launch bigger jobs faster, move seamlessly between projects and accelerate time-to-results, with benefits including:
- Consistent, Unified Data Experience: The VAST AI OS provides one consistent data experience across Stampede3, Vista and Horizon, so users and admins carry forward familiar workflows as capacity and performance step up – helping new communities onboard quickly and turn training into results.
- Throughput and Concurrency for HPC + AI: Designed to feed GPU-dense training and inference side-by-side with traditional simulation workloads, so researchers can run next-gen AI and classic HPC pipelines without re-architecting data paths.
- Operational Simplicity at National Scale: VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture allows for non-disruptive software updates, automated data durability and self-healing services that minimize maintenance windows while increasing CPU and GPU utilization.
- Data Efficiency and Observability: The VAST Catalog provides rapid data discovery to accelerate curation, retention, and cleanup at scale, while advanced reduction and built-in QoS enforce fair-share and workload prioritization, ensuring priority jobs maintain responsive access to hot data during peak demand.
- Security and Governance Built-In: Consistent controls, auditing and policy enforcement to meet the needs of open science communities operating on shared infrastructure.
“TACC continues to set the pace for academic supercomputing,” said Christopher Ginder, Head of Americas Higher Education & Research at VAST Data. “As a proud University of Texas alum, I’m thrilled to see TACC’s work with VAST – from Stampede3 to Vista and now Horizon – underscoring the value of the VAST AI OS’s unified, resilient, high-performance data layer to allow users to spend less time wrestling with data logistics and more time furthering scientific research and discovery.”
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