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Supercomputer aids Navy oceanographers

NORFOLK, Va. — Water-cooled and measuring only 800 square feet, the Power 575 Hydro-Cluster is about as sexy as a supercomputer gets.

It’s smart, too: The $12.6 million system can make 90 trillion calculations per second, making it one of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.

And the Navy has one.

Technically owned by the Defense Department, it’s installed and currently being field-tested at the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where it will perform in-depth weather and ocean condition forecasting.

Where current modeling by supercomputer is limited to specific areas, the increased capacity of the Power 575 Hydro-Cluster will allow oceanographers to predict sea conditions over vast areas of ocean for the Navy and Coast Guard.

Dave Turek, vice president for deep computing at IBM, said the speed allows for any number of possibilities to be modeled over “substantially greater geographic areas,” far from Mississippi.

“It will contribute mightily to solving the kind of problems the Navy is trying to tackle,” he said. “The Power 575 supercomputer is specifically designed for the type of computationally intensive work undertaken by [Naval Oceanographic Office].”

For those unfamiliar, “deep computing” allows users achieve faster, better answers. “Insight is the objective and the subsequent strategic advantage,” he said.

Besides its massive power, it’s compact. Fitting within the dimensions of a small house, as opposed to one of the most recent supercomputer iterations, the Earth Simulator, which measures over 36,000 square feet at its home in Japan.

All those computations generate heat, so the Power 575 is water-cooled — hence the name Hydro-Cluster — which Turek said saves money on the usual air conditioning costs.

It will have a crew of up to six people, he said.

Besides saving money on the electric bill, Dave Cole, associate director of NavO’s Major Share Research Center at Stennis, said the machine’s value resides in “higher resolution and atmospheric models for improved accuracy of forecast” and its ability to provide precise oceanographic predictions.

“This is essential to more effectively support Navy flight and sea safety, search and rescue operations, optimal aircraft and ship routing and mission planning,” Cole said.

It’s four times as fast as the current supercomputer at NavO and should be operational by the end of October, he said.

Turek said the Navy can expect years of use from the Power 575.

“These things don’t wear out their utility,” he said, “though they might be displaced by newer technology in some respects.”

In fact, it’s evolved from a computer famous for playing chess — and winning — against world champion Gary Kasparov.

“This system is sort of connected via silicon DNA all the way back to IBM’s Deep Blue project,” he said.

While the Power 575 is plenty fast at 80 trillion calculations per second, Turek said the fastest supercomputer resides at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where the atomic bomb was developed during World War II. It’s named Roadrunner and it can make 100 trillion calculations per second.

According to a recent Associated Press story, “if every one of the 6 billion people on Earth used a hand-held computer and worked for 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.”