The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) completed its fiscal year 2019 investment in supercomputing capability supporting the DoD Science and Technology (S&T), Test and Evaluation (T&E), and Acquisition Engineering (AE) communities. The acquisition consists of three supercomputing systems with corresponding hardware and software maintenance services. At 21.4 petaFLOPs, this procurement will increase the DoD HPCMP's aggregate supercomputing capability to 66 petaFLOPs. These systems significantly enhance the Program’s capability to support the Department of Defense’s most demanding computational challenges, and include significant capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and machine learning (ML).

The new supercomputers will be installed at the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and US Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs), and will serve users from all of the services and agencies of the Department.  The Navy system will be the first HPCMP supercomputer to be capable of more than 10 petaFLOPS of performance.

Two systems, one being the HPCMP’s first with greater than 25 PetaBytes of storage capacity, will be installed at the AFRL DSRC’s facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio and will serve users from all of the services and agencies of the Department. The architecture of the systems are as follows:

• · A Cray Shasta system with 139,776 AMD EPYC “Rome” compute cores and 104 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), interconnected with a 100 Gigabit per second Cray Slingshot network and supported by 561 terabytes of memory, and 25 petabytes of usable disk storage.
• · A Cray Shasta system with 45,312 AMD EPYC “Rome” compute cores, 26 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), interconnected with a 100 Gigabit per second Cray Slingshot network and supported by 350 TB of NVMe-based solid state storage, 182 terabytes of memory, and 7.5 petabytes of usable disk storage.

The Navy DSRC at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi, will receive a Cray Shasta system containing 64 core AMD EPYC (Rome) processors. The architecture of the system is as follows:

• · A single system of 290,304 AMD EPYC “Rome” compute cores and 112 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), interconnected by a 200 gigabit per second Cray Slingshot network and supported by 1 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage, 590 terabytes of memory, and 14 petabytes of usable storage.

The systems are expected to enter production service early in fiscal year 2021.

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.