On a cloudy afternoon in April, a group of students, faculty and staff assembled in the North Commons of the Science Center to celebrate the latest cutting-edge technology Amherst has acquired in recent years: a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. The event featured a student research poster session and presentations by faculty and staff who have already used the cluster for their work—as well as a much-hyped unveiling of the cluster’s closely guarded name, which had been the subject of a recent contest.
At the end of the gathering, attendees mingled and sampled two cakes, each bearing icing with airbrushed images referencing the cluster’s official moniker. One had a photo of the equipment itself; the other, an image of a certain late poet whose presence (and, well, statue) still looms large at the College.
The name? Wait for it… FrostByte.
“I think it’s neat, catchy, and will be a good name–it’s definitely Amherst-appropriate,” said Amy Wagaman, professor of statistics, adding that the idea was submitted by a student. “We just need to be sure FrostByte continues to crunch our bytes for years to come.”
Funded in large part by a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant the College received in 2021, the cluster came to be thanks to the efforts of Wagaman and Lee Spector, the Class of 1993 Professor of Computer Science, on the faculty side, and Andy Anderson, senior academic technology specialist, and Steffen Plotner, HPC administrator, both from the College’s Information Technology department. Anderson and Plotner spent many months setting up FrostByte to meet the needs of faculty and students, and, once the cluster went online in the fall of 2022, also helped onboard faculty users. The IT team then hired Douglas Hall, research computing specialist, in October of 2023 to expand cluster support and outreach within the Amherst community.
For those in the know, the specs are impressive: FrostByte has 2048 central processing unit cores (CPU) and 126,336 graphics processing unit cores (GPU). To put this into perspective, the latest Macbook Pro has 12 CPU and 18 GPU.
“Your laptop can’t handle this kind of computation,” noted Wagaman with a laugh.