Haise visits supercomputer center

STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. -- Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise visited the Navy Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) at SSC last week for a tour of the center's three new supercomputers -- named after NASA astronauts who served in the Navy. One was named for Haise, who trained as a naval aviator. The two other systems are named for retired Navy Cmdr. Susan Still Kilrain, a naval aviator and space shuttle pilot, and retired Navy Capt. Eugene Cernan, a naval aviator and the last man to step foot on the moon. The IBM iDataPlex systems were installed in the fall of 2012 and became operational in January. The Navy DSRC assists in delivering wind, wave and other oceanographic forecasts to the Navy fleet. It’s one of five Defense Department supercomputer centers that Navy, Army and Air Force scientists and researchers use to design tools and weapons systems that support DoD's global mission. The new systems have tripled the supercomputing capability of the DSRC. The DSRC's current supercomputing capacity is 866 trillion floating point operations (teraflops) a second. One hundred high school students with handheld calculators would take nearly 317 years to perform the number of calculations a one teraflop-rated computer can accomplish in one second-and almost 275,000 years to perform what the new Navy DSRC supercomputers will be capable of every second. The DSRC is expected to increase its capacity to approximately 5,200 teraflops by 2016. (Source: NNS, 02/20/13)