US Navy Drafts IBM for Supercomputing Needs

by David Worthington

July 29, 2004, 2:23 AM

The US Navy is welcoming IBM onboard at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC). Big Blue will deploy its ultra-scale high performance computing (HPC) systems to produce what will be the fastest supercomputer in the US military arsenal: nearly tripling the computing power at the Center. Upon completion the systems will be used to support DoD research and development, enhance global scale modeling and Navy simulations.

The DoD's new systems will place competitively on the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputing clusters in the world. The most intensive system will operate at a peak speed of 20 trillion mathematical operations per second. According to IBM the typical operational availability of the systems is expected to be over 99%.

"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.

NAVOCEANO purchased an unspecified number of IBM eServer p655 POWER4+ systems which will be linked together with IBM clustering technology within the AIX operating environment.

The DoD's Henry continued, "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."

IBM scored another high profile US government contract in November of 2003 when it announced it had began work on its "Teraflop in a box" - a prototype supercomputer about the size of a 30-inch television set capable of processing 2 trillion mathematical operations per second.

The full scale Blue Gene/L machine, derived from Big Blue's "Teraflop in a box" prototype, is being built for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and is expected to catapult IBM back to the position on TOP500 list when work is completed in 2005.

IBM's Power chip architecture is in use in some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, but has also found its way into consumer electronics including products manufactured by Apple, Sony and Nintendo.