SGI was awarded a contract worth $30,750,000 to supply the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) with a 3.9 petaflops SGI ICE X supercomputer. This is the second time in the last two months that SGI has inked a major deal with the Department of Defense (DoD) for its ICE product. Both awards were allocated through the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), which connects DoD scientists and engineers with the HPC resources they need to explore new theories, reduce the time and cost of developing weapon systems, and improve design quality. In October, SGI announced that it would be providing the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) with an ICE X supercomputer as part of a technology insertion contract. Both systems will facilitate mission-critical research and innovation for the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) most significant challenges.
SGI’s Rebecca Noriega revealed the new system will have 3,576 nodes equipped with Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 “Haswell” CPUs paired with both NVIDIA GPGPU nodes and Intel Xeon Phi accelerator nodes (178 of each). The operating system will be SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. The petascale system will be housed in the Defense Supercomputing Resource Center at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where it will support the DoD’s science and engineering communities on a wide range of application areas, spanning fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, materials design, space situational awareness, climate and ocean modeling and environmental quality.
“The new system will be co-located with the 8 M-Cell ICE system deployed as part of the DoD’s Spirit SGI ICE X supercomputer and will feature 6 M-Cells—SGI’s single largest M-Cell deployment,” writes Noriega. “SGI’s M-Cell technology provides industry-leading power and cooling efficiency.”
The AFRL contract also includes 12.4 PB of SGI InfiniteStorage 5600 storage on NetApp E-Series technology, running Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software. Department of Defense documents indicate the project will be completed by July 3, 2019.
The October deal between the DoD and the U.S Army Engineer Research and Development Center was for a 4.6 petaflops SGI ICE X supercomputer and an InfiniteStorage 5600 storage system to be installed in a new multi-million dollar facility at the US Army ERDC Information Technology Laboratory in Vicksburg, MS. When the system was announced, SGI referenced it as “the fastest unclassified supercomputer in the DoD.”
Cray has also been tapped to supply the DoD with a powerful compute and storage infrastructure. The supercomputer maker will provide the Defense Department with two XC40 supercomputers and two Sonexion storage systems as part of a $30 million contract with the High-Performance Computing Modernization Program. The US Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at the John C. Stennis Space Center, one of the five supercomputing centers established by the HPCMP, will house the Cray systems, which will be commandeered for high-resolution, coastal-ocean circulation and wave-model oceanography research in support of Navy and DoD operations worldwide.