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DoD, ARMY INSTALL SUPERCOMPUTERS TO INCREASE POWER

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. 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 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 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."

The NAVOCEANO MSRC has a unique focus within the DoD HPC Modernization Program, spanning both operational and R&D computing needs of the DoD. This includes support of some of the world's most computationally intensive R&D projects, known as "Challenge Projects," representing some of the most critical research within DoD. These diverse R&D projects include new military aircraft, ship and vehicle designs, improved missile and projectile design, and advanced research in global high-resolution meteorology and oceanography.

"This immense supercomputing capability will give the NAVOCEANO MSRC the performance needed to push its HPC capabilities to a new level," said Dave Turek, vice president, Deep Computing, IBM. "These sophisticated computational capabilities will help to produce improved, more realistic simulations and analyses during a very critical period for the US military."

IBM, U.S. Army Reach Supercomputing Agreement

IBM also announced that the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (ARL MSRC) is adding a massive IBM Supercomputer to its spectrum of high- performance computing (HPC) systems, further cementing the Center as one of the largest computing centers in the Department of Defense and the world. Slated to be among the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world, the powerful 10 teraflop system (trillion floating-point operations per second) will be used by the DoD researchers to speed the research and development of advanced military systems.

"This increase in computing capability will give DoD scientists and engineers the ability to solve complex, mission-critical, physics problems in a timeframe that can provide the data necessary to better assist our staff in solving some of our nation's most complex defense challenges and solutions," said Charles J. Nietubicz, Director of the ARL MSRC. "With the combined supercomputer upgrades, the ARL MSRC also becomes the first and only center in the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Office providing greater than 10 terabytes (10,000 GB) of memory - making this deployment a major accomplishment for our organization and benefit to the users."

The 2,304-CPU cluster will consist of 1186 IBM eServer e325 nodes, each equipped with dual-2.2 GHz AMD Opteron processors, a Myrinet interconnect and will run SUSE Linux. This new system is part of the HPCMO's "Technology Insertion 2004," an initiative to modernize DoD's high performance computing capabilities

"It is now more important than ever that the DoD is equipped with the most sophisticated and agile systems," says Dave Turek, Vice President of Deep Computing for IBM. "IBM worked closely with the DoD to develop a powerful, Linux based, state-of-the-art supercomputing solution that would meet their needs and offer the reliability and ease of management to significantly increase the organization's overall performance in the breakthrough defense technologies."

About NAVOCEANO

NAVOCEANO, located at the John C. Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi, has the responsibility of supplying oceanographic knowledge to all elements of the Department of Defense by conducting ocean surveys, analyzing oceanographic data and generating products to meet safe navigation and weapon/sensor performance needs using a variety of platforms that include ships, aircraft and satellite sensors and buoys.

About the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center

Established in 1996, the ARL MSRC helps the DoD focus and exploit high- performance computing technology for military advantage across the battlespace. This customer-focused, world-class computational facility supports DoD's research and development, science and technology, and test and evaluation communities with some of the world's newest, scalable, parallel computers. These supercomputers feature shared and distributed memory architectures from multiple vendors, including IBM, SGI, and Linux NetworX. Researchers use of the ARL MSRC facilities includes physics based modeling and simulation of more lethal, more survivable weapon systems, exploring new chemical reactions, analyzing sensors and experimental data, and developing new composite materials.

About IBM

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.