NRC nabs first revamp award

The High-Performance Computing Modernization Program Office has announced its first contract award in its plan to revamp the Defense Department's scientific computing and communications infrastructure.

Under the eight-year contract, estimated to be worth up to $155 million, Nichols Research Corp. (NRC) , Huntsville, Ala., will establish and maintain a high-performance computing center at the Army Corps of Engineers' Waterways Experiment Station (WES) in Vicksburg, Miss.

The contract has a base period of three years with a subsequent two-year option and three one-year options.

The DOD HPC Modernization Program Office chose WES and three other centers—the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; the Naval Oceanographic Office at the Stennis Space Center, Miss.; and the Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.—as the mainstay of the upgraded high-performance computing infrastructure.

Awards to upgrade these other three centers have yet to be announced. In addition, the HPC modernization office will award a contract to build a new high-speed network, called the Defense Research and Engineering Network, which will link the four centers and other smaller centers.

Under the just-announced contract, NRC will combine high-performance capabilities already at WES with new massively parallel and scalable architectures. The WES center will specialize in computational structural mechanics; computational fluid dynamics; and modeling in climate, weather, oceans, forces and environmental quality.