NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release:                           Contact: Rachelle Hintson

Release Number: 14-2                              Email: Rachelle.Hintson [at] hpc.army.mil

The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) has made significant progress toward improving access to supercomputing for the DoD research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) community through the use of a web-enabled portal. The combined efforts of the development and testing teams at the Maui High Performance Computing Center and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), as well as the deployment team at the Navy’s DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC), have resulted in a new, easy-to-use, web-based portal which provides access to DoD supercomputers and scientific visualization tools via a standard web browser. The High Performance Computing (HPC) portal requires no user-installed software, and provides a secure unified access point protected by multi-factor authentication using a common access card or Yubikey token. The portal is available at portal.hpc.mil. Prior to the advent of this HPC service, workstations with software installation privileges as well as significant network bandwidth, to allow large and frequent file transfers to/from HPC systems, were required to make effective use of HPC resources. The HPC Portal removes the requirement for additional local software, and co-locates the workflow and compute software with the computed datasets, reducing data movement and potentially improving the time-to-solution and time-to-discovery for the user.

“The HPC portal provides a much-needed means of simplifying the workflow for the user community,” said Tom Dunn, director of the Navy DSRC.

This innovative service is fully operational and available on the Navy DSRC’s supercomputer systems, Kilrain and Haise. Each system is a 400 TFLOP/s IBM iDataPlex, containing 40 TB of memory and over 1,200 compute nodes, each with 16 cores, yielding more than 19,500 compute cores for the system as a whole.

The HPCMP partners with the DoD RDT&E community and serves as an innovation enabler. The use of HPC in the DoD is widespread and includes capabilities in fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, materials design, space situational awareness, climate and ocean modeling, and environmental quality.

The long-term goal of the portal is to provide a user-friendly, single point of entry for communities of practice, allowing access to computational and storage resources across all the DSRCs. It is anticipated that this new approach will attract a broader set of users and diversify the requirements for HPC across the DoD.

[PDF Version]

About the DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP)

The HPCMP provides the DoD with supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications and computational science expertise that enable 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 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.