Navy engineers needed powerful computers to model underwater explosions and assess the performance of new warhead designs.

They found a solution with Altix servers and InfiniteStorage solutions from SGI in Mountain View, Calif.

Armed with these computational and storage resources, technicians with the Warhead Performance and Target Response Branch at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Indian Head, Md., can now simulate target response to underwater explosions with sufficient fidelity to evaluate the effectiveness of current and future Navy weapons systems.

In April, the Navy purchased two SGI Altix 350 mid-range servers, each configured with 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 32 gigabytes of memory, as well as 6 terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 RAID, to perform end-to-end simulations using highly complex, specialized software codes. The SGI server and storage systems are tied to a high-speed InfiniBand networking switch, enabling the Navy customer to run hydrocodes used to model underwater explosions on the two 32-processor SGI Altix 350 systems or to run code utilizing all 64 processors. For additional information, visit www.sgi.com.

This cluster allows NSWC-Indian Head to tackle their most demanding application workloads, such as accurately modeling and simulating the complex interactions between underwater explosions and physical structures such as surface ships, submarines, and mines.

“The addition of the new Altix servers and InfiniteStorage systems from SGI allow our scientists and engineers to conduct analyses on larger and more complex problems than we were able to attempt in the past,” says Amos Dare, manager of the Warhead Performance and Target Response Branch at NSWC-Indian Head. “It is now possible to conduct large three-dimensional computations, enabling faster full 3D analyses of explosive systems.”