News From USJFCOM: USJFCOM, HP reach first milestone in ongoing Cooperative Research and Development Agreement

Modeling and Sim photo illustration USJFCOM, HP reach first milestone in ongoing Cooperative Research and Development Agreement

U.S. Joint Forces Command and the Hewlett-Packard Company recently reached a milestone in their ongoing cooperative research and development agreement to research high performance computer provisioning to support the command's modeling and simulation efforts.

By JOC(SW/AW) Chris Hoffpauir
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va., - Jan. 25, 2006) -– U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company recently reached a milestone in their ongoing Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).

According to Mike Egnor, deputy director of USJFCOM's Office of Research and Technology Applications, the command has recently conducted the first research effort with Hewlett-Packard to test the ability of selected software applications to efficiently administer hardware resources in a simulation environment.

USJFCOM and HP have a cooperative, mutually beneficial agreement focused on high performance computing to support the various joint modeling and simulation environments used to accomplish elements of the command's joint training and joint experimentation missions.

Part of USJFCOM's technology transfer authority, CRADAs define the individual responsibilities of each party toward achieving the objectives in the agreement, as well as rights to the intellectual property developed. CRADAs allow the parties to collaborate on the use of intellectual property while protecting the technical data and proprietary rights of the parties.

Under this research effort, HP is providing the command with a 100-processor computer cluster and technical expertise to support the research effort. USJFCOM is providing HP access to constructive simulations, so they can measure how their hardware supports commercial provisioning software in a simulation environment.

Egnor said the provisioning software manages how the cluster’s computing resources are used by automatically loading operating systems and simulation programs onto processors as they are needed.

The processors are arranged in pairs, or nodes. Researchers simulated failures throughout the system to test the software’s ability to efficiently administer hardware resources.

“The system is server-based – it sends out the operating system and the simulation software to each node. When a node fails, the provisioning software finds another node to run the program on,” Egnor said. “During the test we simulated a failed node and the provisioning software automatically sent the simulation to another available node.”

According to Egnor, the software also did this without any loss of performance capability.

Egnor said by allowing software to configure the system’s hardware, rather than using a system administrator, the command has the opportunity to significantly reduce the overhead cost of configuring simulations for joint exercises and experiments.

According to Egnor, the next major effort under the CRADA will be to move from 32- to 64-bit computer architecture.

Egnor explained that upgrading to 64-bit architecture promises a significant increase in processing power.

“The computer industry is moving to a 64-bit microprocessor environment and the expertise of our industry partners can help reduce the risk and cost of moving our flagship constructive simulations to that environment”