A 17.7 petaflops supercomputer will be installed at the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at the Stennis Space Center, Mississippi.
Named Blueback after an eponymous US Navy submarine, the HPE Cray EX4000 system features both AMD and Nvidia hardware.
The submarine, pictured, was the last non-nuclear submarine to join the United States Navy. It was decommissioned in 1990 after 34 years in service.
With 256,512 compute cores in total, Blueback is composed of AMD Epyc Genoa CPUs, 128 AMD MI300A Accelerator Processing Units (APUs), and 24 Nvidia L40 GPUs, connected by a 200 gigabit per second Cray Slingshot-11 interconnect and supported by 20PB of usable Cray ClusterStor E1000 Lustre storage, including 2PB of NVMe-based solid state storage, and 538TiB of system memory.
The supercomputer is expected to enter production service in 2024. It will replace three older supercomputers in the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), and will join existing Navy DSRC HPC systems Narwhal, a 308,480-core HPE Cray EX supercomputer which is currently the largest unclassified supercomputer in the DoD, and Nautilus, a 176,128-core Penguin TrueHPC supercomputer.
The HPCMP handles the US military's supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications, and computational science expertise. It is managed on behalf of the DoD by the Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
