NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release: June 24, 2013                                   Contact: Rachelle Hintson

Release Number: V-17-13                               Email: Rachelle.Hintson [at] usace.army.mil

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC), one of the five supercomputing centers in the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), is proud to announce the transition to full production of its newest supercomputer for the Department of Defense. The new SGI ICE X supercomputer, named “Spirit” in honor of the B-2 Stealth Bomber, is located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Installation of the new system expands the installed supercomputing capability of the AFRL DSRC by 1.415 quadrillion floating point operations per second (petaFLOPS), making it one of the top 20 fastest computers in the world. The new system will support research, development, test and evaluation in a diverse array of disciplines ranging from aircraft and ship design to microelectronics and protective systems.

“The AFRL DSRC has a rich legacy in providing leading edge computing capability for the Department of Defense,” said John West, HPCMP director. “All of our centers have large scale technical computing and a commitment to service in their organizational DNA, but AFRL has always had a special emphasis on service that makes them uniquely well-suited to host a resource at this scale for the department.”

The system is housed in 32 M-racks that includes 4,608 compute nodes with 9,216 sockets (73,728 cores) powered by Intel® Xeon® processors operating at 2.6 GHz, 146 Terabytes of memory, and 4.6 Petabytes of usable disk space.

As a partner with the HPCMP, AFRL provides a world class HPC Center committed to providing the resources necessary for DoD scientists and engineers to complete their research, development, testing and evaluation projects. Since the organization's inception in 1996, the AFRL DSRC has supported the Warfighter by combining powerful computational resources, secure interconnects, and application software with renowned services, expertise and experience.

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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, development and test 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 complete 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.

For more information, please visit our website at: www.hpc.mil