Air Force and Navy ink new supercomputing deal
The Air Force and Navy will be getting new high-performance computing power from Penguin Computing.
The contract was agreed through the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) for a total of $68 million. The deal includes managed services and high-performance storage for both services.
The computers will offer the military a combined peak performance of over 17.6 petaflops, or 17.6 quadrillion operations per second. This compares with the government’s most powerful computer currently in use at Oak Ridge National Lab – Summit – which operates at about 148.6 petaflops per second. Most personal computers only calculate several teraflops, or several trillion operations, per second.
“By implementing Penguin’s TrueHPC solution, the DoD HPCMP user community will be able to conduct advanced research for the highly complex problems the user community is tasked with solving,” Sid Mair, president of Penguin Computing, said in a statement.
Penguin has partnered with chip maker NVIDIA for its a100 graphics processing units and super computer company AMD for its EPYC processors to create the TrueHPC tech it sold to the DOD.
The computers will be installed at two of the four HPCMP locations. The program offers services across the DOD that need the massive power of high performance computing to tackle complex computations.
“This partnership puts advanced technology in the hands of US forces more quickly, less expensively, and with greater certainty of success,” according to the HPCMP. “Today, the HPCMP provides a comprehensive advanced computing environment for the DoD that includes unique expertise in software development and system design, powerful high-performance computing systems, and a premier wide-area research network.”
