Stanford University has brought its first GPU-based supercomputer online, and it’s named after a fictional detective. Marlowe, a nod to Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled Philip Marlowe, is now hunting down answers to research questions across political science, astrophysics, and everything in between.
The system is built on an Nvidia DGX H100 SuperPOD architecture. It houses 31 DGX H100 nodes containing 248 Nvidia H100 80GB GPUs, paired with 2.5 petabytes of DDN Lustre high-performance storage.
What Marlowe actually does
Marlowe offers non-preemptible access, meaning researchers get dedicated, uninterrupted computing time rather than preemptible cloud instances where jobs can be kicked off the server when someone with higher priority needs the resources.
The supercomputer became operational for the Stanford research community on January 15, 2025. It now supports over 500 active research accounts spanning all seven of Stanford’s school divisions.
