The US Army is to give Cray and SGI just over $53 million for the construction and maintenance of Department of Defense supercomputers.

The contracts are part of the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), which aims to overhaul the HPC infrastructure of the US Army’s executive branch.

US Army fires a High Explosive 120mm mortar round during Exercise Saber Guardian 16
– US Army/Spc. Timothy Jackson

High Performance Contractors

Cray will supply a new XC40 supercomputer for the DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) at the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for $26.5 million.

SGI has two contracts, one for $17.6m, and another for $8.9m, to provide two new systems for the Army Research Lab’s DSRC in Aberdeen, Maryland.

The deals are part of the four one-year options for system maintenance guaranteed in the original 2014 contracts. SGI installed an ICE X supercomputer and an InfiniteStorage 5600 high performance storage system at the DSRC in Mississippi.

Back in 2014, Cray provided a Xeon-powered XC supercomputer and a Cray Sonexion storage system for the DSRC in Maryland. 

Five DSRCs exist, all of which use either Cray or SGI systems, and provide the DoD with “large-scale HPC systems, high-speed networking, multi-petabyte archival mass storage systems, and customer support services.”

Currently, the five DSRCs contain more than 26 petaflops of aggregate computing power across some 900,000 cores.