University of Maryland's Deepthought2 Debuts in Global Supercomputer Rankings

  • 06/30/14

COLLEGE PARK, MD — A University of Maryland (UMD) supercomputer for the first time has been ranked among the most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the 43rd edition of the closely watched list released twice yearly by TOP500.org. Deepthought2, launched in May 2014 to support advanced research activities, ranks No. 14 among U.S. universities, making the high-performance computing system one of the nation’s fastest in an academic setting.

In the recently released June 2014 TOP500 List, Maryland’s Deepthought2 ranked No. 347 in the world, with performance listed as 298.2 peak teraflops. This means that Deepthought2 can complete between 250 trillion and 300 trillion operations per second. It has a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of storage and is connected by an InfiniBand network, a very high-speed internal network. Put another way, Deepthought2 is the equivalent of 10,000 laptops working together, it has 2,000 times the storage of an average laptop, and its internal network is 50 times faster than broadband.

“Having one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers demonstrates that the University of Maryland is intent on providing the local high-performance computing capabilities our faculty and student researchers need to increase dramatically the pace and scope of their scientific explorations and discoveries,” says Ann G. Wylie, professor and interim vice president for Information Technology. “This new research computing asset cements UMD’s role as one of the country’s premier academic centers for scholarship and research,” Dr. Wylie said.

UMD researchers plan to use Deepthought2 in a variety of investigative fields ranging from health sciences to fire protection engineering to earth sciences.

“Supercomputing is a transformative technology for U.S. universities,” says Fran LoPresti, deputy CIO of Cyberinfrastructure and Research IT for the Division of Information Technology. “Now, Maryland’s world-class supercomputer equips researchers with the computing resources and data storage necessary to make scientific and engineering advances in some of the most challenging compute-intensive and data-intensive fields,” says LoPresti.

“We’ve established new interdisciplinary teams that will rely heavily on this superb computing platform to tackle some of the biggest challenges in astronomy, bioinformatics and the environmental sciences,” says Dr. Amitabh Varshney, director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Professor of Computer Science.

About the University of Maryland
The University of Maryland is the state’s flagship university and one of the nation’s preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 37,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff and 250 academic programs. Its faculty includes three Nobel laureates, two Pulitzer Prize winners, 49 members of the national academies and scores of Fulbright scholars. The institution has a $1.8 billion operating budget, secures $500 million annually in external research funding, and recently completed a $1 billion fundraising campaign. For more information about the University of Maryland, visit www.umd.edu.

About the TOP500
Launched in 1993, the TOP500 project compiles and analyzes data and tracks, detects and reports trends in high-performance computing. For more information, visit www.top500.org.

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