US Defense Selects IBM Supercomputer to Help Prevent Disasters at Sea

STENNIS SPACE CENTER, MS: The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) will house a powerful new IBM supercomputer that will be used principally to support the oceanographic modeling and analysis needs of researchers at the Department of Defense.

The supercomputer, a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, has a peak speed of 90 teraflops (90 trillion floating-point operations per second), making it one of the most powerful systems in the Department of Defense. The NAVO MSRC is one of four Department of Defense High Performance Computing MSRCs established under the auspices of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

"The Power 575 supercomputer is specifically designed for the type of computationally intensive work undertaken by NAVO," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing for IBM. "This system will enhance DoD research efforts and significantly enhance the ability to perform detailed oceanographic modeling and weather forecasting that will help keep the naval fleet and commercial shippers out of harm's way."

The Power 575 Hydro-Cluster is powered by one of the world's fastest microprocessors, POWER6, and is cooled by an innovative water system that makes it highly energy-efficient. The Power 575 is designed to help users tackle some of the world's most challenging problems in fields such as energy, aerospace and weather modeling.

"This new IBM system represents a tremendous increase in the Center's computational capacity. Many DoD scientists and researchers are looking forward to having this system available to support their computational needs," said Tom Dunn, Director, NAVO Major Shared Resource Center.

The Department of Defense Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) located at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO), Stennis Space Center, MS, serves the nation as one of the premier supercomputing centers in the world. The NAVO MSRC provides a scientific computing environment that serves over a thousand scientists and engineers throughout the nation engaged in research and development, and test and evaluation activities for the DoD. The NAVO MSRC also provides, on a daily basis, global, regional, and very high-resolution coastal ocean circulation and wave model oceanography products supporting worldwide Navy and DoD operations.

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