The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) recently completed a portion of its fiscal year 2023 investment in supercomputing capability supporting the DoD Science and Technology (S&T), Test and Evaluation (T&E), and Acquisition Engineering communities. The acquisition consists of a supercomputing system with corresponding hardware and software maintenance services.

At 17.7 petaFLOPS, this system will replace three older supercomputers in the DoD HPCMP’s ecosystem and ensures that its aggregate supercomputing capability will remain above 100 petaFLOPS, with the latest available technology. This system significantly enhances the Program’s capability to support the Department of Defense’s most demanding computational challenges and includes the latest generation accelerator technology from AMD in the form of 128 AMD MI300A Accelerator Processing Units (APUs). 

The system will be installed at the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC) facility operated by the Commander, Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (CNMOC) at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi and will provide high performance computing capability for users from all services and agencies of the Department. The architecture of the system is as follows:
 

• An HPE Cray EX4000 system with 256,512 total compute cores, composed of AMD EPYC Genoa processors, 128 AMD MI300A Accelerator Processing Units (APUs), and 24 NVIDIA L40 GPGPUs connected by a 200 gigabit per second Cray Slingshot-11 interconnect and supported by 20 PB of usable Cray ClusterStor E1000 Lustre storage, including 2 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage, and 538 TiB of system memory.

The system is expected to enter production service in 2024.  It will be named BLUEBACK in honor of the U.S. Navy submarine USS Blueback (SS-581) and will join existing Navy DSRC HPC systems NARWHAL, a 308,480-core HPE Cray EX supercomputer which is currently the largest unclassified supercomputer in the DoD and is named in honor of the USS Narwhal (SSN-671), and NAUTILUS, a 176,128-core Penguin TrueHPC supercomputer named in honor of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571).

About the DoD High Performance Computing 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 wide-range of focused research and development, test and evaluation, and acquisition engineering activities. This 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 comprehensive advanced computing environment for the 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 the Department of Defense by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center located in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

For more information, visit our website at: https://www.hpc.mil.
 
About the Naval Oceanography and Meteorology Command
Naval Oceanography has approximately 2,900 globally distributed military and civilian personnel, who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to guarantee the U.S. Navy’s freedom of action in the physical battlespace from the depths of the ocean to the stars.