NSF's $457M Horizon Supercomputer Is Going to Morehouse College
The Leadership-Class Computing Facility's first new site selection in a generation lands at an HBCU. The workforce implications matter as much as the FLOPS.
Morehouse College, a historically Black institution in Atlanta with roughly 2,100 undergrads, has been selected to host Horizon, a leadership-class supercomputer funded by a $457 million National Science Foundation grant through the Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF) program. The project is led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin, with Morehouse serving as a primary partner for deployment, programmatic support, and workforce development.
This is the most consequential site selection in academic supercomputing in years, and it has almost nothing to do with diversity optics.
What the LCCF actually is
Let's put this in context. The NSF's Leadership-Class Computing Facility program is the successor to the funding mechanisms that built NCSA, TACC, and the other pillars of the U.S. academic computing infrastructure. These aren't grants that get sprinkled around. LCCF represents the national strategy for where leadership-class computing resources live and who has access to them for the next decade-plus.