U.S. Department of Defense to Use HP Supercomputer for Weapons Systems Design

The 10-teraflop system will enable the DoD to accelerate its research and collaboration on advanced weapons concepts, improve and speed up modification programs, enhance simulation programs and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. (A teraflop is a measure of computer speed and equates to a trillion floating-point operations per second).

The HP supercomputer is a 1,024-node Cluster Platform 4000 based on HP ProLiant DL145 servers with AMD Opteron™ processors running the Linux operating system. A high-speed Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect is used with HP's XC System Software providing cluster management capability.

"HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio will enable us to capitalize on the tremendous advances in price/performance provided by industry-standard technologies, while providing a fully supported, robust production system for our critical workload," said Steve Wourms, director, ASC MSRC.

In addition to the HP Cluster Platform 4000 production system, a smaller eight-node development system is also being deployed at ASC and an additional 46-node development cluster will be installed at Arnold Engineering Development Center, Arnold Air Force base near Tullahoma, Tenn.

"HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio will enable the Department of Defense to gain unprecedented levels of insight into its future demands," said Tom Johnson, director, Worldwide Defense Solutions, HP. "The simulations and test protocols enabled by this supercomputer solution will be among the most sophisticated in the world, powering advances in access, integration and collaboration across the agency's research efforts."