The University of Maryland (UMD) and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the central laboratory that provides world-class research for the Army, today announced a strategic partnership to provide high-performance computing (HPC) resources for use in higher education and research communities. The agreement will link UMD to an Army supercomputer – “Harold.”

From Campus Technology,

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.

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