Navy buys IBM supercomputer

The Naval Oceanographic Office has purchased an IBM Corp. supercomputer that will give the Defense Department new problem-solving capabilities, according to IBM officials.

The computer will be the fastest supercomputer in the military, performing a peak speed of 20 teraflops, or 20 trillion operations per second, according to IBM officials.

Navy officials will deploy the system at the office's Major Shared Resource Center, located at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The purchase also includes a fast supercomputer cluster.

The new systems are designed to triple the effective computing power of the center, said Cray Henry, director of the DOD high performance computing modernization program, in a statement.

The power will go to improved computational support for research and development and enhanced global scale modeling and simulation capabilities that will support Navy and DOD operations worldwide, he said.

"The new IBM systems at [the Naval Oceanographic Office] will enable DOD scientists and engineers to solve complex problems previously impossible with smaller systems," Henry said.

"This immense supercomputing capability will give the [center] the performance needed to push its [high-performance computing] capabilities to a new level," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "These sophisticated computational capabilities will help to produce improved, more realistic simulations and analyses during a very critical period for the U.S. military."