MOVIES

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., -- SGI announced that the U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Technology Service, on behalf of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), issued an initial order for SGI(R) hardware, software, and services worth $26 million. SGI technology will provide DoD researchers with the added processing power and shared memory to compute and analyze increasingly complex mission-critical problems and keep the DoD HPCMP at the forefront of advanced high-performance computing. The order includes SGI hardware, software and services, as well as optional customer support over 42 months. The SGI products to be purchased provide a full range of computational resources including SGI(R) Origin(R) 3000 scalable supercomputers, an SGI(R) Onyx(R) 3000 series graphics supercomputer, SGI(R) Origin(R) 300 midrange technical servers, SGI(R) Total Performance 9500 (TP9500) RAID storage arrays, and the SGI(R) CXFS(TM) shared filesystem. Four DoD high-performance computing centers have been selected to deploy these SGI systems -- the Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC), Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Vicksburg, Miss.; Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), Monterey, Calif.; and the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), Patuxent River, Md. These SGI systems will be applied to local, mission-specific and technical challenges and will address the overall DoD research, development and test computing requirements. The DoD HPCMP was established to enable the United States to maintain its technological supremacy over adversaries in weapon systems design and foster the flow of this technology into warfighting support systems. Driven by SGI technology, the four high-performance computing enhancements announced today are expected to significantly contribute to the DoD's technological goals. "The extensive new HPC capabilities and increased performance provided by these SGI systems at two of our Major Shared Resource Centers and two Distributed Centers will help address the department's highest priority needs in science and technology and test and evaluation," said Cray J. Henry, director, DoD HPCMP. "These systems will provide critically important and highly visible examples of how HPC provides military advantage for the warfighter." "SGI delivers world-class, high-performance computational capabilities to the DoD's science and technology and test and evaluation communities, and that's why we were awarded this contract," said Tony Celeste, national director of defense business, SGI Federal. "SGI beat some formidable competition because of our high-bandwidth computer architecture and the unsurpassed scalability and flexibility of our systems, not to mention our robust production operating environment, system density and footprint, and outstanding service and support. The selection of SGI technology is reflective of the DoD's increased focus on delivering real breakthroughs, not theoretical ones. SGI Origin 3000 systems are unique in their ability to handle up to 512 microprocessors and two terabytes of data in memory in a single operating image, allowing DoD scientists to run complex simulations of weather, oceanography or explosions in a straightforward manner." ASC will greatly enhance its shared-memory capabilities with the installation of four 512-processor SGI Origin 3000 supercomputers, two 64-processor SGI Origin 3000 systems, a 12-processor SGI Origin 3000 system, two 4-processor SGI Origin 300 systems, and 10TB of SGI TP9500 storage. NAWCAD has upgraded two 32-processor SGI Origin 3000 systems and purchased a 24-processor SGI Origin 3000 system and a 24-processor SGI Onyx 3000 system. NAWCAD will use the new SGI systems for computational improvements, which will improve the support for the Joint Strike Fighter weapon system by increasing real-time processing capabilities and real-time high-fidelity representations of virtual platforms/systems immersed in a realistic synthetic battlespace. ERDC will install two 512-processor SGI Origin 3000 supercomputers and 20TB of TP9500 storage and, along with ASC, will use the new systems to address the overall DoD research and development computing requirements of the science and technology and test and evaluation communities. FNMOC will augment its SGI high-performance computing resources with a new 256-processor SGI(R) Origin(R) 3900 supercomputer and 6TB of SGI TP9500 storage and support application of the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS(TM)) model at resolutions of a few kilometers. COAMPS is the Navy's operational mesoscale atmospheric model and the basis of much of the highly focused support FNMOC provides to its warfighter customers.