Mary-Louise Hoffman
A Department of Energy-sponsored facility and Cray have partnered to help the U.S. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center implement a supercomputing system to support the military service’s weather forecasting activities. Cray said Wednesday it will deliver a Shasta high-performance computer through the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of a $25M contract.
ORNL will provide supercomputing as a service to the service branch’s 557th Weather Wing via the system in an effort to help the military unit disseminate data on terrestrial and space weather to USAF and the Army.
The company plans to equip the supercomputer, dubbed HPC11, with AMD EPYC processors, a Slingshot interconnect and tools designed to support processing of numerical prediction workloads.
Steven Wert, program executive officer for digital at AFLCMC, said he expects the system to help Air Force Weather personnel manage various models and address environmental impacts on mission planning. The service branch expects to receive HPC11 by early next year.
