Infrastructure

UMIACS fosters innovative interdisciplinary research by supporting an advanced research-computing infrastructure with services and resources for:

• High Performance Computing on a variety of architectures including clusters of computers acting as a distributed-memory parallel systems, Symmetric Multi-Processing systems, and General-Purpose GPU systems.
• Distributed Computing on a high-speed Local Area Network with load-balancing services and fast Wide Area Network connectivity through the Mid Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), the Next Generation Internet Exchange (NGIX), the Internet2, and the National Lambda Rail.
• Data Intensive Computing on a variety of disk, tape, and file-system platforms that host major data collections for our labs and the national research community with a focus on long-term preservation of digital data and human-computer interfaces for digital libraries.
• Visual Computing on very high-resolution tiled displays and immersive visualization environments.
• Private Cloud and Web Hosting environments that run on the VMware and KVM hypervisors that support Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure as services to our labs.
• Advanced Technology Prototypes developed by our faculty and their research programs

Each of the Institute’s facilities is lead by distinguished faculty members who direct the work of our researchers, systems administrators, network engineers, and programmers. These interactions between academic researchers and information technology professionals equip the Institute’s leading research programs with cutting edge technologies and forward-thinking infrastructure. While no single system is extremely large in scale, the site as a whole is a large installation with 1200 supported computers, 2500 network ports, and 400 Terabytes of managed data.