Navy Supercomputer Center at Stennis to Greatly Increase Computing Capability

STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. (NNS) -- One of the Defense Department's most powerful supercomputer centers, located at Stennis Space Center, Miss., will more than triple its computing power this summer when it adds three new supercomputers.

The additions to the Navy Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC) will be operational by the fall.

"This upgrade will put South Mississippi's supercomputing capabilities back in the top 100 of the world," Dr. Bill Burnett, deputy/technical director of the Stennis-based Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, said of the upgrade.

Navy DSRC is one of five Defense Department supercomputer centers that Navy, Army and Air Force scientists and researchers use to design new aircraft, ships, and military equipment; to model and simulate weather and ocean conditions; and for a wide range of other DoD mission-related science and engineering research. The Navy DSRC is a part of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP).

The new supercomputers, all IBM iDataPlex Linux clusters, will give the center a capacity of nearly 800 trillion floating point operations (teraflops) per second or the capability to conduct 800 trillion arithmetic calculations per second. One hundred high school students with handheld calculators would take nearly 317 years to perform the number of calculations a teraflop-rated computer can accomplish in one second - almost 250,000 years to perform what the new Navy DSRC computers will be capable of every second.

The additions will allow the center to retire its existing IBM Power5+ system, an IBM Power6 system, and a Cray XT5 system at the end of the year.

In a nod to the Navy DSRC's location at Stennis Space Center, the systems will be named after astronauts who have served in the Navy: Fred Haise, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who also served as a Navy and Marine Corps aviator and the Apollo 13 pilot; Cmdr. Susan Still Kilrain, a naval aviator who piloted two shuttle missions and more than 30 different aircraft; and Capt. Eugene Cernan, a naval aviator and the last person to set foot on the moon.

"We are especially excited to honor former naval aviators who have served as astronauts, starting with South Mississippi's own Fred Haise," Burnett said. Haise is a native of Biloxi, Miss.

High performance computing or supercomputing allows DoD to make the most of its dollars spent on research, development, test, and evaluation.

"These supercomputers enable the DoD science and research community to test and model defense systems that cannot be modeled in the real world due to time, financial, physical, or safety constraints, and in some cases, they can accomplish this work in a matter of hours as opposed to the days, weeks, or even months that traditional research methods can require," said Tom Dunn, director of the supercomputing center.

Within the HPCMP, the Navy DSRC is unique in providing supercomputing resources available 24/7 to the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (NMOC). These high performance computing resources are used by the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) and the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) for ocean and weather forecasts in support of U.S. Navy fleet operations.

Two of the iDataPlex systems will be identical, each consisting of 18,816 Sandy Bridge Intel processor cores, 37 terabytes of memory and 2.3 pedabytes of disk storage space available for computational modeling and research. A third iDataPlex system will have 4,032 of the same processor cores, eight terabytes of memory and 576 terabytes of disk storage. The peak computational capabilities of the two larger systems will be 351 teraflops each, and the third system will be capable of 75 teraflops.

The HPCMP provides DoD supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications and computational science expertise that enable DoD scientists and engineers to conduct a wide-range of focused research, development and test activities. The partnership puts advanced technology in the hands of U.S. forces more quickly, less expensively and with greater certainty of success. Today, the HPCMP provides a complete advanced computing environment for DoD that includes unique expertise in software development and system design, powerful high performance computing systems, and a premier wide-area research network. The HPCMP is managed on behalf of DoD by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.

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For more news from Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, visit www.navy.mil/local/cnmoc/.