INDUSTRY

From Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command Public Affairs

Apollo 13 astronaut and Mississippi native Fred Haise visited the Navy Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) at Stennis Space Center, Miss., Feb. 15, for a tour of the center's three new supercomputers.

All of the systems are named after NASA astronauts who have served in the Navy, including Haise who trained as a naval aviator.

The two other systems are named for retired Navy Cmdr. Susan Still Kilrain, a naval aviator and space shuttle pilot, and retired Navy Capt. Eugene Cernan, a naval aviator and the last man to step foot on the moon.

"Today, we are proud to recognize the contributions of an iconic American and native Mississippian," said Dr. William H. Burnett, deputy commander and technical director of the Commander Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command at Stennis Space Center. "Just as Fred Haise has made a great impact on the state, the Navy and the nation, so will the supercomputer named after him."

The IBM iDataPlex systems were installed in the fall of 2012 and became operational in January. The Navy DSRC assists in delivering wind, wave and other oceanographic forecasts to the Navy fleet. It is one of five Defense Department supercomputer centers that Navy, Army and Air Force scientists and researchers use to design tools and weapons systems that support DoD's global mission.

The new systems have tripled the supercomputing capability of the DSRC, already one of the most powerful supercomputer centers within the Defense Department.

"The fact that I'm here today was dependent on computers," Haise said. "We went to the moon on one tenth of a megabyte [of memory]. For four days we had no computer on board at all. That was the springboard of what is happening today in the computer world."

The DSRC's current supercomputing capacity is 866 trillion floating point operations (teraflops) a second. One hundred high school students with handheld calculators would take nearly 317 years to perform the number of calculations a one teraflop-rated computer can accomplish in one second-and almost 275,000 years to perform what the new Navy DSRC supercomputers will be capable of every second. The DSRC is expected to increase its capacity to approximately 5,200 teraflops by 2016.

Haise completed Navy flight training in 1954 and served as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and also served in the U.S. Air Force. His career with NASA spanned 20 years. He flew as the lunar module pilot for NASA's Apollo 13 space mission and as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 8 and 11 and backup spacecraft commander for Apollo 16.

The Navy DSRC is a part of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program. For 19 years, the Navy DSRC has been recognized as one of the top 15 most capable supercomputing facilities in the world.

For more news from Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, visit www.navy.mil/local/cnmoc/.