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AFRL's New Supercomputer Reaps Significant Energy Savings

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  • Directed Energy
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, New Mexico --  The Air Force Research Laboratory's Maui High Performance Computer Center (MHPCC) operates one of the fastest supercomputers in the Department of Defense. In July 2013, MHPCC rolled out a new supercomputer called Riptide, which is 2.45 times faster than their previous system and uses 40 percent to 50 percent less power than the system it replaced, saving $.6 million a year. The MHPCC, located at the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing site, provides high-performance, cost-effective computing support for the nation's research, science, and warfighter communities.

Power is a significant driver in the cost to operate High Performance Computer data centers. This direct water cooled demonstrator system is a pathfinder for lowering infrastructure costs across the Department of Defense's (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program, not only saving money for the more than 350 DoD and government users at MHPCC, but eventually lowering energy cost by millions of dollars across the entire DoD.

The MHPCC DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) is one of the nation's five DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) supercomputing resource centers aimed at accelerating the development of DoD technologies. MHPCC is among the fastest computers within DoD, allowing users to get faster solutions to complex computational problems. The MHPCC DSRC provides high performance computing for the DoD's scientific computational needs through support of DoD "Challenge Projects" and other government users.

The Center also supports the AFRL Directed Energy Directorate's Maui Space Surveillance System, located atop the 10,000-foot volcano Haleakala. Collectively, the DSRCs provide more than 700,000,000 hours annually to their users. With the addition of Riptide, the computational capacity at MHPCC is currently more than 290 TeraFLOPS (290 trillion Floating Point Operations per Second); Riptide is 251.6 TeraFLOPS.