GPU wall
Yarnell’s 36-box DIY privacy wall—worth about $75,000 in GPUs—contains just a tiny portion of the packaging for 1,500 units he oversees at the UMIACS data center in the A.V. Williams Building, as well as at workstations in graduate labs.

“They were first designed as gaming devices, but now we can do a lot of interesting scientific computing,” he said. As an undergrad, Yarnell couldn’t have dreamed of one day overseeing such a vast computational infrastructure.

“Graduating when I did, I hit the iron hot. I was in the right place at the right time,” said Yarnell. Today, UMIACS’ computers play host to a variety of high-performance computing applications, especially machine learning research. He supports the work of about 80 researchers across campus in areas as varied as computational linguistics, robotics and human-computer interaction.