Dell Technologies has been awarded a subcontract for $40 million to deliver expanded computing capacity for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Under the second Commodity Technology Systems contract (CTS-2), funded by the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program, Dell will deliver over 40 petaflops of expanded computing capacity to the agency’s Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories to support NNSA’s nuclear deterrent mission.
Thuc Hoang, director of the NNSA’s ASC program said, “The CTS-2 systems will serve the NNSA stockpile management and production modernization programs, along with other mission-critical efforts underpinning our stockpile stewardship program.”
The NNSA’s ASC program develops and produces advanced modeling and simulation capabilities that ensure the reliability and protection of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
The contracted computing systems will be deployed in scalable units (SUs) and are expected to increase NNSA’s overall computing capacity by approximately three to four times, enabling higher quality 2D and 3D simulations and allowing for more complex parameter studies.
These SU building blocks, which represent approximately 1.5 petaflops each of computing power, will replace the ASC’s current commodity systems, sourced by the 2015 CTS-1 contract, which are nearing retirement.
The new hardware will work in tandem with existing Tri-Laboratory Operating System Software (TOSS) to build the foundation for the common ASC user simulation environment.
The SUs delivered under CTS-2 will be powered by Intel Xeon scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) and Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Initial deliveries are expected to begin in mid-2022 and will continue through 2025.