Northrop Grumman wins $170M super deal

Northrop Grumman Corp. last week won a $170 million contract to run a high-performance computing center at the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) at Stennis Space Center, Miss. This is the third in a series of four contracts being awarded this spring, under a plan to revamp the Defense Department's high-performance computing resources.

Together, the four centers will offer supercomputing cycles, tools and training to about 5,000 DOD users. Most of those users will tap into the facilities through a planned high-speed network.

Nichols Research Corp. won the first two awards to manage centers at the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and the Army Corps of Engineers' Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, Miss.

Northrop Grumman's Data Systems and Services Division, which won the latest contract, plans to install new supercomputers at NAVO within weeks. Northrop Grumman will install Cray Research Inc. T90 vector and T3 massively parallel processing machines and a Silicon Graphics Inc. Power Challenge Array.

The only other bidder on the NAVO center was Raytheon E-Systems in Dallas.

Northrop Grumman has been running the center since 1990 under the Primary Oceanographic Prediction System and a follow-on contract.