Penguin Computer Announces $68M DOD Contract to Deliver Supercomputing Platforms

Penguin Computing has been awarded a $68 million contract to deliver supercomputer platforms to the Department of Defense.

The contract was administered through the DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, Penguin Computing said Tuesday.

Penguin Computing will install its TrueHPC high-performance computer at two of HPCMP’s four DOD Supercomputing Resource Centers: the Navy DSRC at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s DSRC at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Both locations will receive some variation of a system that boasts the latest generation of AMD’s enterprise-grade EPYC processor and Nvidia’s A100 general-purpose graphics processing unit.

The Navy DSRC will receive a TrueHPC platform with 176,128 compute cores, while the AFRL DSRC will receive one with 189,000.

The platforms will also come with approximately 400 TB of system memory, over a petabyte of high-speed NVMe solid-state storage and a peak performance of 9 petaFLOPs.

Penguin Computing said TrueHPC will allow the DSRCs to tackle computationally demanding problems in fluid dynamics, chemistry and materials science, electromagnetics and acoustics, climate and weather modeling and simulation and other applications.

The DSRCs will also have access to Penguin Computing’s managed services team, which is tasked with introducing additional capabilities in emerging technologies.

Sid Mair, president of Penguin Computing, said Nvidia and AMD’s technologies will enable greater operational efficiencies for the DOD, which he said equates to more value when it comes to large-scale computers with high power requirements.

“By implementing Penguin’s TrueHPC solution, the DoD HPCMP user community will be able to conduct advanced research for the highly complex problems the user community is tasked with solving,” Mair added.