The modernization program encompasses four full-service Major Shared Resource Centers, which house DOD's largest supercomputers, and 17 distributed centers that focus on smaller projects. Henry showed several visualizations of simulations run on DOD computers. Many shared a theme of analyzing fluid flow over complex surfaces, which is important in weapons systems design. Computational scientists also model groundwater flow to help clean up environmentally distressed DOD sites. Under the modernization program, scientists conduct basic research in materials for weapons and transportation systems, Henry said.
Some calculations examine the behavior of materials at the atomic and molecular levels.
Advances in clustering technology and application software have driven high-performance computing lately, said Stan Posey, SGI's director of manufacturing industry marketing. Researchers are getting better at making large numbers of processors work together as one system and developing software that efficiently uses multiple processors, he said. For example, a particular automotive crash simulation has gotten 14 times faster and 306 times cheaper than it was a few years ago, Posey said. The Washington naval lab evaluates large-scale computing and networking applications for DOD, Dardy said.