New Name, Expanded Mission

Winter 2022

When MARCC (the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center) launched in 2015 on the campus of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, it was hailed as one of the nation’s largest academic high-performance computing centers. MARCC’s swift fiber-optic cable connections let investigators conduct research on everything from deadly diseases to distant galaxies without leaving their laboratories or offices, and participants shared the costs.

Now MARCC has a new name and an enhanced mission. It has become ARCH (Advanced Research Computing at Hopkins), an expanded facility designed to sustain advanced and data-intensive computing growth, and enable innovative, dynamic, and life-improving computational discoveries.

Like MARCC, ARCH is structured on a model called “condo computing”: Users buy their own nodes and have them installed in a central cluster. Researchers then have priority access not only to the resources they purchased but also to those of other researchers in the cluster.

ARCH management has plans to partner closely with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science to facilitate a seamless process of data sharing.

“We see ARCH becoming a critical resource to initiatives here at Hopkins that are developing and applying AI and machine learning to improve the lives of people on our fragile planet,” says Paulette Clancy, head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and chair of the faculty oversight group for ARCH.

In At WSE