The US Department of Defense has finally agreed to develop supercomputer cloud service, which will add the capacity and the ability to remotely access Pentagon’s high-performance computers. The approval came after two companies completed an 18-month prototyping period.
Rescale and Parallel Works demonstrated that their solutions successfully increase the computing power of High-Performance Computing Modernization Program’s (HPCMP) Supercomputing Resource Centers without significantly increasing hardware costs or requirements.
The solutions work together to integrate the Centers, as well as multiple cloud service providers, into a robust network offering a wide range of HPC capabilities to the DoD in a single coherent ecosystem, said Pentagon’s Innovation Unit in a press release.
Access to a wider variety of hardware
“This capability allows the HPCMP to securely combine the capacity and capability of DoD HPCMP Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs), with the flexibility and diverse hardware associated with commercial cloud providers in order to create a seamless ecosystem for DoD researchers,” said Dr. Benjamin Parsons, HPCMP Chief Technology Officer.
“Researchers are [now] able to access cloud resources when appropriate to augment their work at on-premises centers. This has given them access to a wider variety of hardware, and the ability to scale resources beyond what is currently possible, all within one secure, easy to use, environment.”
Rescale stated that in the DIU deployment, the Rescale platform was proven to offer considerable advantages for optimized, fast, efficient access to HPC systems including both on-premises data centers and through major cloud services, DIU stated in the success memo.
According to the company, the capabilities provided by Rescale enhance the ability of the DoD and other federal agencies to process production and research workloads for operational, strategic, and environmental analysis, as well as the coordination of resources in an environment that meets some of the nation’s top security standards and regulations.
HPC-as-a service powers technological breakthroughs
It demonstrates that Rescale’s HPC-as-a service powers technological breakthroughs by greatly reducing the complexities of running HPC and AI computational tasks.
“The HPCMP is looking forward to providing this capability to our DoD partners to further enhance our HPC compute and data analytics capabilities,” said Dr. Parsons.
Essential to meet Pentagon’s modern needs
“These capabilities are essential to meeting the needs of the DoD scientific and technology, test and evaluation, and acquisition communities who are key to supporting the warfighters across the globe.”
“Your laptop probably has four [CPU] cores on it. These people, what they do, is that when you solve the problem, they’ll run something across 10,000 cores,” Matt McKee, the chief operating officer of Rescale, told Defense One.
