U.S. Defense Dept. buys its fastest supercomputer ever for research

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) will buy its fastest computer ever, a new high-performance computing systems from IBM for use at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC). Once in place, the new system is expected to run at a peak speed of 20 trillion mathematical operations per second. That would rank it as one of the fastest supercomputing clusters in the world, according to the current Top500 List of supercomputers.

Located at the John C. Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi, NAVOCEANO supplies oceanographic knowledge throughout the DoD. The new supercomputers will triple the effective computing power of the center and will improve the Navy’s ability to perform global scale modeling and simulation.

“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 High Performance Computing Modernization Program. "We are particularly pleased to acquire a nearly 3,000 processor system -- the largest single system that we have ever fielded.”

Using ships, aircraft and satellite sensors and buoys, NAVOCEANO conducts ocean surveys, analyzing oceanographic data and generating products to make navigation safer and to help evaluate and improve the performance of weapons and sensors.