JHU, UMD researchers are getting a giant new Big Data center

Maryland’s two major universities are pooling resources — and they’re doing it for Big Data.
A nondescript, 3,700-square-foot building on Johns Hopkins’ Bayview campus will house a new data storage and computing center for university researchers. The $30 million Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center (MARCC) will be available to faculty from JHU and the University of Maryland, College Park.
According to the JHU Hub, MARCC (pronounced “Marcie” in academic-speak) is one of the largest university data centers in the nation. It’s equipped with 19,000 processors, and 17,000 petabytes of storage. The center will send information back and forth to university campuses via a fiberoptic connection.
The idea is to create more capacity so researchers can be more efficient. Astrophysicists who crunch data from telescopes and biomedical researchers analyzing genomes were offered as a couple of examples of users.
MARCC isn’t scheduled to open until the end of the month, but about 80 percent of the space is already spoken for. If it fills up, the universities are ready. JHU has enough land for four more centers of similar at the Bayview campus.
The buildings go up just like this: