10 Times the Computing Capacity, at Only Twice the Electricity

Staff members put the finishing touches on Deepthought2, a new supercomputer at the U. of Maryland. (Photo courtesy of U. of Maryland)

The University of Maryland at College Park has a new Ferrari of a supercomputer, and it’s students who are taking it for a test drive.

Some 60 students enrolled in the university’s high-performance-computing boot camp, now in its second of two weeks, are the first to make use of Deepthought2, the newest supercomputer in higher education. The $4.2-million machine has a processing speed of about 300 teraflops, meaning it can complete up to 300 trillion operations per second, and it has a petabyte of storage. It is the equivalent of 10,000 laptops working together simultaneously, university officials say.

Fire and combustion, drug-resistant bacteria, and the formation of the first galaxies are examples of phenomena that will be studied using Deepthought2.

The machine is an encore to Maryland’s original supercomputer, Deepthought, which dates to 2006. It will remain operational, officials say, although it is located at a different site.

Deepthought2 draws up to 150 kilowatts of electricity, twice the power consumption of Deepthought, but has 10 times the computing capacity. The gains are due in part to developments in processors driven by companies like Intel, says Kevin Hildebrand, systems architect at the university. The companies are fitting more transistors onto a single processor, and the processors are running at lower voltages.

“While they are gaining in capacity, they are also gaining in efficiency,” Mr. Hildebrand says of the most advanced processors. “When you put all that together, it makes the actual machine be a lot more efficient so you can get a lot more computing done for less power.”

The heat generated by supercomputers typically means that the facilities that house them have to be air-conditioned, with temperatures kept around 65 degrees. With Deepthought2, fans were built into the server racks to channel the heat out through a ventilation system, allowing the university to keep the room at 72 degrees and save money, says Mr. Hildebrand.

Officials say the supercomputer will make the Top500 List, the most prominent of international supercomputer rankings. An updated list is scheduled to be released on June 23.

The world’s supercomputers tend to be given monolithic names. A quick scan of the Top500 List turns up monikers like Titan, Stampede, and Vulcan. Maryland’s Deepthought is a reference to a computer in the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that is built to answer the ultimate question of life.

Fran LoPresti, deputy chief information officer for cyberstructure and research IT at the university, says that the hardest part of the two-year project was finding the real estate. Ultimately, because of a space crunch on the campus, the information-technology department leased 9,000 square feet in a commercial building adjacent to the university’s research park.

“I had to find a facility that I could upgrade to a megawatt of power,” Ms. LoPresti says. “Most office buildings—you just can’t do that. We can’t do that on campus. I would say, until I had that lease, I wasn’t sure this project could go forward.”

Apart from bragging rights, officials say the supercomputer will support groundbreaking work while also playing a central role in the recruitment of top-flight research talent. Ann G. Wylie, a professor of geology who is interim vice president for information technology, says that Deepthought2 sets the stage for an entirely new wave of projects, some of them not yet dreamed up.

“Having the supercomputer here,” Ms. Wylie says, “will expand the ideas our faculty have.”