The U.S. Navy Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) on Monday announced plans to install its first supercomputer with a peak performance of over 10 petaflops (12.8 petaflopsto be exact). Cray will build the supercomputer on its Shasta platform, and the supercomputer will come packing AMD Epyc CPUs and Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs.
Packing 12.8 petaflops would qualify the supercomputer to be one the top 25 most powerful computers today. However, the Navy won't finish installation for this supercomputer until 2021, so it's ranking may end up being lower by then.
"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," Rear Admiral John Okon, head of Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command, said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
"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 HPCMP [High Performance Computing Modernization Program]."
The new Cray supercomputer will feature 290,304 AMD Epyc 7002-series processor cores, 112 Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs, a 200 gigabit per second Cray Slingshot network interconnect, 590TB of memory and 14 petabytes of usable storage.
All this power will be used for aircraft, ships and environmental modeling. It will also track hurricanes and their intensity. The Navy’s new supercomputer is set to live in the same Mississippi location where a U.S. Department of Homeland Security data center will also be built.
That's just one Cray Shata supercomputer making its way into the U.S.' defense system. In August, Cray signed three high-performance computing contracts with the Pentagon worth more than $71 million: one for the U.S. Air Force and one Cray CS500 cluster supercomputer each for the Army Research Lab and U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.
