{"id":26186,"date":"2025-07-28T00:18:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T00:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/26186\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T00:18:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T00:18:15","slug":"betty-penns-new-off-campus-supercomputer-joins-the-ai-arms-race-in-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/26186\/","title":{"rendered":"Betty, Penn’s new off-campus supercomputer, joins the AI arms race in computing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new, glass-walled supercomputer called Betty<\/a> sits on the top floor of a high-fenced brick data center on a hill 30 miles northwest \u2014 by road and two separate twin-fiber data lines \u2014 from its operators at the University of Pennsylvania<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Betty is a stack of central processing units, a \u201cSuperPOD\u201d<\/a> of graphics processing units, plus data storage, made by Nvidia, the world\u2019s most valuable company,<\/a> thanks to soaring demand for high-speed and artificial-intelligence queries. <\/p>\n

Betty is designed to run AI models that search, analyze, and report findings from videos, images, texts, and databanks. The models are designed to improve with each query, per researchers\u2019 ever-more-specialized instructions.<\/p>\n

At its home in Montgomery County<\/a>, Betty hums louder than a commercial jet rising <\/a>from an airport. It burns enough electricity to power a village of 1,000 homes.<\/a> <\/p>\n

The site, named for pioneering Penn computer scientist Frances \u201cBetty\u201d Holberton<\/a> (1917-2001), is one of the tenants at Flexential Corp.\u2019s data center in Collegeville. It\u2019s run by the Penn Advanced Research Computing Center, its humming, flashing champion in the high-stakes academic struggle to meet fast-growing demand. <\/p>\n

Penn expects Betty to land on the Top500.org<\/a> list of the world\u2019s most powerful supercomputers.<\/p>\n

\u201cTop universities\u2019 faculty are competing for grants and for students. If they don\u2019t have the resources to compete, they won\u2019t be in good shape,\u201d said Jaime Combariza, a computer scientist and systems manager Penn recruited from Johns Hopkins to run PARCC. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo all universities are providing these centralized research groups. The idea is to keep people happy, so they use the facility and will succeed,\u201d Combariza said. <\/p>\n

An \u2018arms race in computing\u2019<\/p>\n

During two years of meetings among deans and researchers from the university\u2019s 12 colleges, the plan for Betty was approved quickly and built in less than a year \u2014 record time for Penn decision-making, according to Michael Borda, Penn\u2019s associate vice provost for research. <\/p>\n

\u201cNo question, there\u2019s an arms race in computing,\u201d Borda said. \u201cWe were not offering enough capacity.\u201d <\/p>\n

Betty quadruples the university\u2019s computing capacity, with plenty of room to grow, Combariza said. Today\u2019s denser, faster processor racks not only handle bigger, more complex queries but are much more efficient than machines built just a few years ago.<\/p>\n

On July 11, info tech leaders from most of Penn\u2019s 12 colleges walked through prison-style \u201cman trap\u201d doors and into the glass enclosure to visit Betty, for the first time.<\/p>\n

The visitors inserted earplugs and filed into the space between Betty\u2019s twin man-high server banks, scouting for the machines that handle their research queries. They shared discoveries like first-year students visiting their new dorm. <\/p>\n

Penn scientists and their grad students \u201care doing a lot of research with large-language [AI] models and processing large images with large file sizes, so this is another computational capability we provide,\u201d said Meredith Fetters, associate chief financial officer of research information systems at Penn\u2019s Perelman School of Medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going from looking at single images to looking at entire videos \u2014 hundreds of images [for each search] per minute. You\u2019re scaling up the computations,\u201d said Kenneth Chaney, associate director for AI and Technology for PARCC. AI is \u201cused for language, video, and audio. The more, the better.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three-story building housing Betty \u201ccolocates\u201d corporate tenants, including GlaxoSmithKline, which constructed the building to support its neighboring labs but outsourced the site and its rapid hardware, software, and connectivity updates to Flexential in 2017. <\/p>\n

So why is Betty so far from Penn\u2019s campus? <\/p>\n

\u201cThe hard thing in Philly is power,\u201d as in electrical capacity, Charney said. It\u2019s hard to get an extra megawatt from Peco, the city\u2019s dominant power supplier. To have a data center in the city, Penn would have to build its own power plant, and suitable sites are scarce.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will grow. We\u2019ll need that next megawatt\u201d and more, Charney said.<\/p>\n

The third floor of the building, where Betty sits, has a view of the cooling towers of the Limerick nuclear power plant, whose capacity owner Constellation Energy wants to increase by 300 megawatts, or about 15% \u2014 enough to power 200,000 homes, or 200 Betty-size centers. <\/p>\n

Pennsylvania will need more electricity to support larger AI-serving data centers<\/a> planned in places including the Susquehanna Valley and at the former U.S. Steel Fairless Works in Bucks County<\/a>. A proposal next to PBF\u2019s oil refinery in Delaware City, Del., would require more power than is currently generated <\/a>to serve the state\u2019s nearly 1 million residents.<\/p>\n

Powering Penn\u2019s new center<\/p>\n

Flexential\u2019s Collegeville center is fed by two separate Peco substations at high voltage. But even short interruptions can crash AI applications and disrupt users for days or longer, so the first floor holds eight electric power generators. Fuel stored on site can keep the center running for several days in the case of an extended public power outage, said Patrick Doherty, Flexential\u2019s chief revenue officer. <\/p>\n

Flexential runs 40 data centers around the United States. National competitors include Digital Realty and NTT. <\/p>\n

Access to electric power is important, along with strong fiber communications networks, land for expansion, and population, \u201cwhere the users are. Philadelphia checks all the boxes,\u201d Doherty said.<\/p>\n

Data centers \u201care at historically low vacancy rates nationwide,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is simply a lack of capacity and a need for endless computing power. AI is driving this.\u201d <\/p>\n

How AI supports research<\/p>\n

Research universities, with hundreds of professors, acting like small businesses with their own peculiar needs, are accelerating as \u201cfast adapters of AI technologies,\u201d Doherty said. Outsourcing \u201callows them to free up real estate, deploy faster, and apply for more grants,\u201d and he sees Penn\u2019s Betty as a model. <\/p>\n

To demonstrate PARCC\u2019s capacity, Charney runs a video of a quadruped robot being<\/a> taught to walk a yoga ball in simulation, and then demonstrate what it has learned by <\/a>crossing the intersection on a real-world yoga ball, at the busy intersection of 34th and Walnut Streets on Penn\u2019s campus, in a project set up by Penn computer scientists Dinesh Jayaraman and Osbert Bastani. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey are asking ChatGPT to tell if the robot is doing a good job or not,\u201d Charney said. \u201cBefore we would have had to go to [an outside] data center or to Nvidia to schedule time on their systems,\u201d which are often \u201cfully booked. But with Betty, we can do this research completely at Penn.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Betty project set up by Marylyn D. Ritchie, vice dean for AI and data science, and her team at the medical school\u2019s Institute for Biomedical Informatics<\/a> is a genome study sequencing and rechecking the genes of 60,000 Americans \u2014 requiring more than 100 gigabytes per person at some stages. The project resembles the United Kingdom\u2019s Hundred Thousand Genomes Project<\/a>, which has provided unprecedented data for communities in Britain. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just professors and their graduate students who will rely on Betty, Charney said. Today\u2019s undergraduates ask AI programs to write software code for them. \u201cThey can make a full-stack Web deployment, back end, front end, user interface. It used to be you couldn\u2019t do something like that until several years into your job,\u201d Chaney said. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe always want to be looking forward,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone is now employing these GPUs. Soon we want to be able to deploy quantum computing<\/a>. Neumorphic processes<\/a>. Maybe in five years.\u201d <\/p>\n

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Kenneth Chaney’s last name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new, glass-walled supercomputer called Betty sits on the top floor of a high-fenced brick data center on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[64,63,257,105,25445],"class_list":{"0":"post-26186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-upenn-artificial-intelligence-computing-data-center-betty"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}