The US Navy Unveils New Supercomputer, Nautilus – Which Runs on Penguin Computing’s TrueHPC Platform

The Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC) recently announced the newest addition to their lineup of supercomputers – Nautilus.

The Nautilus supercomputer is a Penguin Computing TrueHPC system that is the result of the $35 million contract that was awarded by the DoD in September 2021. The system is housed at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and has a peak performance of 8.2 petaFLOPS. Nautilus completed its final testing in April 2023. 

“We’re proud that Penguin Computing’s TrueHPC supercomputer completed its final testing last month for the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center,” said Tom Ireland, vice president at Penguin Computing. “As one of the Navy’s six supercomputers, the Nautilus HPC system enables scientists and researchers to use complex applications to unlock weather patterns and ocean modeling, providing predictive insights about the earth’s climate and sustainability.”

The Nautilus HPC system boasts an impressive configuration, including 1,352 compute nodes with 128 AMD EPYC Milan compute cores per node for a total of 176,128 compute cores, 256 GB of memory per node for a total of 382TB, 16 NVIDIA A40 visualization nodes, 32 NVIDIA A100 Quad GPU AI/ML nodes, 26 petabytes of DDN storage (including 4.15 petabytes of NVMe storage), and a 200 Gbps NVIDIA Mellanox Infiniband interconnect.

Nautilus will enable scientists and researchers to achieve their objectives in various scientific disciplines, including climate, weather, and ocean modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and computational chemistry. By using complex applications on these specialized HPC systems, they can predict the behavior of engineered systems in complex environments and analyze patterns in physical systems including weather forecasting natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

Nautilus is currently available to R&D teams in the Navy, Army, Air Force and other DoD components and will soon be open for use by all members of the DSRC network.