The Department of Defense Modernization Program Increases HPC Capabilities in DoD

The Department of Defense HPC Modernization Program finalized its fiscal year 2016 investment in super-computing capability supporting the DoD science, engineering, test and acquisition engineering communities.

The total life-cycle investment is valued at $63.7 million, including acquisition of three supercomputing systems with corresponding hardware and software maintenance services. With the addition of 10 petaflops of computing capability, this procurement will increase the DoD HPCMP’s aggregate super-computing capability to 31.1 petaflops. One petaflop equals 1,015 floating-point operations per second of computing capability.

The three systems will collectively provide more than 233,000 compute cores, more than 890TB of memory, and a total disk storage capacity of 43PB. These supercomputers will serve users from all services and agencies of the department. Two of the HPCMP’s five DoD super-computing resource centers will receive systems as part of this procurement, the US Army Research Laboratory DSRC in Aberdeen, MD, and the US Army Engineer R&D Center DSRC in Vicksburg, MS.

This competitive government acquisition was executed through the US Army Engineering and Support Center in Huntsville, AL which selected systems from Silicon Graphics Federal, LLC and Cray, Inc.

About the DOD HPC Modernization Program (HPCMP)
The HPCMP provides the Department of Defense supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications and computational science expertise that enable DOD scientists and engineers to conduct a range of focused R&D, test and evaluation, and acquisition engineering activities. This partnership puts technology in the hands of US forces more quickly, less expensively, and with greater certainty of success. The HPCMP provides a computing environment for the DOD that includes expertise in software development and system design, HPC systems, and a wide-area research network. The HPCMP is managed on behalf of the DoD by the US Army Engineer R&D Center located in Vicksburg, MS.