The US Army’s New AI Supercomputer

December 1, 2024

U.S. Army
Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD
866-570-7247
www.arm.mil

The Army announced the deployment of a new supercomputer for its scientists and engineers to conduct a wide range of focused research and development, test and evaluation, and acquisition engineering activities.

The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory’s Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (ARL DSRC) will name the supercomputer Fran, in honor of one of the original six ENIAC programmers.

The ENIAC, which stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the world’s first general purpose scientific computer, which began operation on Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1947.

The HPE Cray EX System is named for Frances “Fran” Bilas. It is a single, large, unclassified, high-performance computer, emphasizing standard compute nodes.

Officials said it will be the first system in the new Army AI Innovations Institute, commonly known as A2I2, facility and is scheduled for delivery in December 2024.

According to Jamie Stack, ARL DSRC Customer Service Director, Fran also has the first NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs at DEVCOM ARL, specifically designed for generative artificial intelligence, large language models and HPC workloads.

“Fran will provide ARL researchers access to one of the largest unclassified computing resources,” Stack said. “It provides a diverse computing resource as well with large memory compute nodes, visualization nodes, dedicated AI/machine learning nodes and a large number of dedicated compute nodes.”

With the arrival of Fran later this year, the center will have platforms on the floor celebrating all six original ENIAC programmers: Frances Elizabeth “Betty” (Snyder) Holberton, Betty Jean “Jean” (Jennings) Bartik, Kathleen “Kay” (McNulty) Mauchly Antonelli, Ruth (Lichterman) Teitelbaum, Marlyn (Wescoff) Meltzer and Frances V. “Fran” (Bilas) Spence.

Fran places the ARL DSRC in a unique position with six computing platforms on the floor at once, and is the largest computer ever hosted by ARL.

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