The Department of Defense announced today the last in a
series of
contract actions to establish a DoD-wide, integrated
high performance computer infrastructure of more than 100 defense
laboratories, tests centers, university and industrial sites.
E-
Systems Inc., Dallas,Texas, was awarded a contract with a
projected total value of nearly $169 million to develop and
manage a computer center at the
Army Research Laboratory,
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Md.
Similar centers, announced earlier this year, will be at the
Aeronautical Systems Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
Ohio; Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg,
Miss.; and Naval Oceanographic Office, Stennis Space Center,
Miss.
Together, these four centers will form the nucleus of the
DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization program.
The $2 billion modernization program supports the high-end
computational needs of the defense research, development, test
and evaluation community.
First, the four centers will provide
multiple large-scale computer systems and staff to support
continuous upgrades and user needs.
A second component of the
program will be twelve smaller distributed centers managed and
operated by individual user organizations.
The third component
will be a high-speed, high bandwidth network, the Defense
Research and Engineering Network, connecting these centers to
other selected users.
When the four centers become fully operational, the HPCM
program will have significantly increased the computing and
communications capabilities of the DoDs 4,000 computational
RDT&E scientists and engineers.
Another benefit of the HPCM
program will be the reduced cost, risk and time involved in
development and procurement of future defense systems, according
to Anita Jones, director, defense research and engineering.
On an historical note, this year, the U.S. celebrates the
50th anniversary of the delivery of the first modern digital
computer, the ENIAC, to the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory
(now Army Research Laboratory).
The new center's computer
capability will deliver over one hundred million times the power
of that first computer.
