High-Performance Computing

U Maryland, Army Lab Partner on Supercomputing

• By Leila Meyer
• 08/01/16

The University of Maryland (UMD) and the United States Army Research Laboratory (ARL) have partnered to connect the ARL's supercomputer, nicknamed "Harold," to the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads at UMD in order to provide the higher education and research communities in that region with access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

The Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) is a University of Maryland center that operates a multi-state advanced cyber-infrastructure platform. The Mid-Atlantic Crossroads will connect Harold to its ecosystem using its 100 Gbps optical network. Students, professors, engineers and researchers will then be able to use the HPC resource "to build research networks, explore complex problems, engage in competitive research opportunities and encounter realistic research applications," according to a news release. Private and startup companies that connect through the network infrastructure at the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads will also have access to this resource.

"Our goal is to take the cutting-edge computational power that we use for defense research, development, test and evaluation and put that in a place that will benefit the wider scientific community," said Raju Namburu, chief of the Computational Sciences Division of the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Before connecting Harold to the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads, the machine will have to be scrubbed, declassified and brought into the Army Research Laboratory's demilitarized zone, or perimeter network, according to the news release. It will then be allocated to the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads' internet protocol (IP) address space. At that point it will be accessible to the collective communities University of Maryland, the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads and the Army Research Laboratory's Open Campus, which is an initiative to build a science and technology ecosystem.

"The UMD/MAX-ARL partnership provides a unique opportunity for both organizations to create a national model of collaboration in the HPC field," said Tripti Sinha, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads and assistant vice president and chief technology officer of the University of Maryland, in a prepared statement. "Collaborative partnerships are key to maximizing our technological potential and ensuring our nation's strength and competitiveness in the critical fields of science and research."