IBM Selected To Provide the Most Powerful Supercomputer to the US Military

HostReview.com
Tuesday, July 27, 2004; 12:00 AM

July 27, 2004 - (HostReview.com) - IBM (www.ibm.com) today announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) has selected new high-performance computing (HPC) systems from IBM for deployment at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) that, when deployed, are expected to include the fastest supercomputer in the US military, and one of the fastest supercomputing clusters in the world, according to the current TOP500 List of supercomputers.

"The new IBM systems at NAVOCEANO will enable DoD scientists and engineers to solve complex problems previously impossible with smaller systems," said Cray Henry, Director of the DoD HPC Modernization Program. "We are particularly pleased to acquire a nearly 3,000 processor system -- the largest single system that we have ever fielded. The tremendous size of this system will allow us to explore, as never before, the limits of scalability for our key applications and our ability to harness the massive power of ultra-scale HPC systems."

The new systems are designed to triple the effective computing power of the Center, providing dramatically improved computational support for DoD research and development (R&D) and enhancement of global scale modeling and simulation capabilities for the US Navy in support of worldwide Navy and DoD operations.

The new supercomputers are designed to substantially enhance the Navy's ability to perform global scale modeling and simulation to carry out its diverse mission, maximizing support to the Fleet worldwide and to the nation. The largest of the new systems is expected to run at a peak speed of 20 trillion mathematical operations per second, and will do so in the NAVOCEANO environment where operational resilience and high availability are of paramount importance. Typical operational availability of the systems is expected to be over 99%.

"Operational availability and resilience of these new systems will be critical elements of our support to the Navy and the Department of Defense," said Steve Adamec, NAVOCEANO MSRC Director. "In combination with the tremendous increase in computational power, we now have an unparalleled ability to quickly bring one of the world's premiere HPC environments to bear on some of the nation's most pressing computational needs, with extremely high confidence that critical systems and services will be available at all times."
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