 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”
|
