One of the USDOD’s top computing providers is due for a massive upgrade in computational performance.
The Navy Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) has announced that it is getting a multi-million dollar Cray Shasta supercomputer capable of a healthy 12.8 petaFLOPS. That’s 12.8 quadrillion floating point operations per second.
Making that possible is “290,304 AMD EPYC (Rome) processor cores and 112 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), interconnected by a 200 gigabit per second Cray Slingshot network.” It also features “590 total terabytes (TB) of memory and 14 petabytes (PB) of usable storage, including 1 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage.”
What this means is that the machine can run Crysis, but the Navy will be flexing its power for more important applications such as military technology and informational systems.
“The investment and increase in supercomputing power at the Navy DSRC at Stennis Space Center is absolutely critical to Naval Oceanography delivering future capability upgrades to global and regional ocean and atmospheric prediction systems, to include later this year the Navy’s first Earth Systems Prediction Capability,” said Commander, Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command (NMOC) Rear Adm. John Okon.
“Naval Oceanography’s ability to be the Department of Defense’s authoritative source for characterizing and applying data of the physical battlespace into a decisive advantage for naval, joint and allied forces hinges on the continual upgrade and advancements in high-performance computing from the High Performance Computing Modernization Program.”
The Navy DSRC’s system should be up and running by early fiscal year 2021. It’s expected to rank in the top 25 of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet.
According to Top 500, IBM’s Summit and Sierra machines hold the top spots. These are capable of 148.6 and 94.6 petaflops of performance, respectively.