The University of Texas will use a $50 million federal grant from the National Science Foundation to build a supercomputer.
The new system announced Thursday will be called Stampede. It will be built at the school's Austin research campus with help from Dell and Intel.
Texas officials say Stampede will help scientists address things such as weather forecasting, energy exploration and building safer cars and planes.
Experts say computational science allows researchers to explore phenomena that are too big, small or dangerous to investigate in a laboratory.
Stampede is scheduled to be running by 2013 and will support more than 1,000 projects across the country. It will be the most powerful system in the National Science Foundation's eXtreme Digital program
The project may be renewed in 2017.
