The powerful HP Cluster Platform 4000 system will be installed in September at the Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The 10-teraflop system will enable the DoD to accelerate its research and collaboration on advanced weapons concepts, improve and speed up modification programs, enhance simulation programs and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. (A teraflop is a measure of computer speed and equates to a trillion floating-point operations per second.)

The HP supercomputer is a 1,024-node Cluster Platform 4000 based on HP ProLiant DL145 servers with AMD Opteron processors running the Linux operating system. A high-speed Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect is used with HP's XC System Software providing cluster management capability.

"HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio will enable us to capitalize on the tremendous advances in price/performance provided by industry-standard technologies, while providing a fully supported, robust production system for our critical workload," said Steve Wourms, director, ASC MSRC.

In addition to the HP Cluster Platform 4000 production system, a smaller eight-node development system is also being deployed at ASC and an additional 46-node development cluster will be installed at Arnold Engineering Development Center, Arnold Air Force base near Tullahoma, Tenn.

"HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio will enable the Department of Defense to gain unprecedented levels of insight into its future demands," said Tom Johnson, director, Worldwide Defense Solutions, HP. "The simulations and test protocols enabled by this supercomputer solution will be among the most sophisticated in the world, powering advances in access, integration and collaboration across the agency's research efforts."

Industry-leadership, excellent price/performance lead to selection

The HP supercomputer was chosen by the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program Office, as part of its Technology Insertion for 2005 (TI-05) program, based on HP's extensive experience in high-performance computing, the completeness and robustness of the solution and its price/performance ratio.

"This deployment further illustrates the market's acceptance of cluster technologies for supercomputing challenges in real world deployments," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing Division, HP. "Our Unified Cluster Portfolio, by bringing together tested and supported scalable solutions for computation, data management and visualization, is an important enabler for adoption of these technologies by demanding industry and government sites."

The HP systems at Wright-Patterson are supported by 100 terabytes of HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share (SFS) system storage. The 12-node clustered SFS system delivers high-bandwidth, high-capacity storage providing fast and easy access to shared storage.

The HP Cluster Portfolio, XC System Software and Scalable File Share are part of HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio, which helps customers manage and visualize large volumes of data. The Unified Cluster Portfolio provides a common implementation across multiple operating systems (HP-UX, Microsoft Windows and Linux) and servers based on industry-standard processors (Intel Xeon, Intel Itanium and AMD Opteron).

HP has been a major supplier of supercomputers to civilian and defense agencies throughout the government for years. Among the list of customers are the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The ASC MSRC is a computational science facility supporting Department of Defense (DoD) research, development, and test and evaluation communities with high-performance computing and visualization resources. Created as part of the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), the ASC MSRC High Performance Computing Center is located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is one of four DoD MSRC sites.

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