University of Maryland at SuperComputing 2025!
In mid-November, the University of Maryland hosted a booth at the Supercomputing 2025 conference in St. Louis, Missouri. As the world’s premier event for high-performance computing (HPC), networking, and data analysis, SC25 brings together researchers, industry leaders, and experts to showcase innovations, share best practices, and present cutting-edge research in supercomputing technologies. SC25 drew 16,500 attendees and 559 exhibitors, the largest SC conference yet. The exhibit floor packed the St. Louis conference center with representatives from hardware vendors, software vendors, cloud providers, research consortia, numerous universities, and funding agencies. Unsurprisingly, this year’s exhibits featured a wide variety of exhibits related to AI, including GPU manufacturers, resellers, cloud providers, software developers, and datacenter cooling and power solutions. Quantum computing also had a significant presence on the show floor, with a significant number of booths in the Quantum Village section of the exhibit hall.
University of Maryland Booth #3123
Kevin Hildebrand (left), MAX Director of Research and Carrie Groff (right), MAX Interim Executive Director
University of Maryland’s booth showcased a wide variety of electronic posters provided by campus researchers detailing their projects using HPC and AI resources, many of which use the campus HPC cluster, Zaratan. In addition, nine students from the CS department presented 10-15 minute talks on their graduate projects, and an additional talk was provided by UMD’s Dr. Franz Klein on Quantum chemistry simulations. Promotional materials for Engineering and CS graduate programs were available for those looking for more information. MAX’s HPC engineers had the opportunity to share the capabilities of Zaratan with booth visitors including alumni, students, researchers, vendors, and other attendees from both the technological perspective of the engineers and the invaluable research support Zaratan provides to our students and faculty.
During the three days the show floor was open, hundreds of visitors stopped by the booth with questions often centered around what programs are offered at the university, what resources are available to researchers, and what kinds of research are being conducted. Other discussions of a more technical nature often sprang up, with other universities comparing their own processes with the way UMD manages and operates its clusters, research programs, and funding models. The booth was also frequented by vendors looking to sell products or to recruit students for job opportunities.
Joy Kitson, UMD Student, speaking on Modeling Interdependent Social and Biological Contagions on Massive Multi-layer Networks
Dr. Franz Klein (QLab) speaking with booth visitors about Quantum Computing
This team was proud to participate and represent the University at the largest super computing conference in the country and are looking forward to exhibiting next year. A special thank you to our sponsors, DataBank, Office of the Vice President for Research, ARLIS, Patrick McCluskey of the Mechanical Engineering Department, and QLab for their generous sponsorships in support of University of Maryland’s presence at this year’s conference.
