HP announced Monday that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) will be using an HP supercomputer for advanced weapons systems design research. The powerful HP Cluster Platform 4000 system will be installed in September at the Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The 10-teraflop system will enable the DoD to accelerate its research and collaboration on advanced weapons concepts, improve and speed up modification programs, enhance simulation programs and enable more efficient tests and evaluations. (A teraflop is a measure of computer speed and equates to a trillion floating-point operations per second.)

In addition to the HP Cluster Platform 4000 production system, a smaller eight-node development system is also being deployed at ASC and an additional 46-node development cluster will be installed at Arnold Engineering Development Center, Arnold Air Force base near Tullahoma, Tenn.

"HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio will enable the Department of Defense to gain unprecedented levels of insight into its future demands," said Tom Johnson, director, Worldwide Defense Solutions, HP. "The simulations and test protocols enabled by this supercomputer solution will be among the most sophisticated in the world, powering advances in access, integration and collaboration across the agency's research efforts."

The HP systems at Wright-Patterson are supported by 100 terabytes of HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share (SFS) system storage. The 12-node clustered SFS system delivers high-bandwidth, high-capacity storage providing fast and easy access to shared storage.