The US Navy’s Department of Defense (DoD) Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC) has a new supercomputer.
Named Nautilus, the high-performance computing (HPC) system has a peak performance of 8.2 petaflops with 176,128 cores. The HPC system also features 382TB of memory and 26 petabytes of storage.
The new supercomputer is the Navy DSRC’s sixth HPC system. Testing of the system finished in April 2023, and it is located at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
Nautilus is a Penguin TrueHPC and is made of 1,352 compute nodes and has up to 128 AMD Epyc Milan compute cores per node, 256GB of memory per node, 16 Nvidia A40 visualization nodes, 32 Nvidia A100 Quad GPU AI/ML nodes, and uses a 200 Gbps Nvidia Mellanox Infiniband interconnect.
Penguin Computing was awarded the supercomputing contract in September 2021, receiving $68 million to build two supercomputers: one for the Navy and another for the Air Force. The company also provided the Corona supercomputer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2020 which was dedicated to the fight against the novel coronavirus.
The new supercomputer is part of the Department of Defense’s High-Performance Computing Modernization Programa (HPCMP), and according to the DoD will play a crucial role in enabling scientists and researchers to look into climate, weather, and ocean modeling, as well as computational fluid dynamics and computational chemistry.
Navy's Narwhal supercomputer also gets an upgrade
The Navy DSRC has also given an upgrade to its ‘Narwhal’ HPE Cray EX supercomputer.
Narwhal has received an additional 18,176 cores, bringing its overall capacity to 308,480 compute cores via an additional 128 standard nodes and 14 large memory nodes with 1 TB per node.
Narwhal is DoD’s largest supercomputer and now has 13.6 petaflops of peak performance. In total, the Navy DSRC now offers ~600,000 compute cores and over 30 petaflops of capacity.
In June 2022, British military contractor BAE Systems won a five-year contract worth $699 million to support the five DSRC users, including the Air Force Research Laboratory, Army Research Laboratory Aberdeen Proving Ground, Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, and the Maui High-Performance Computing Center.
