Varshney Praises Deepthought2 Capabilities

A University of Maryland 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.

"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," said Amitabh Varshney, director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Professor of Computer Science.

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