GDIT awarded $100 million to support new NOAA high-performance computer

NOAA’s latest high-performance computing system that’s aimed at advancing prediction research in areas such as weather and climate will be supported by General Dynamics Information Technology, the Biden administration announced Tuesday.

GDIT won $100 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act to “support the installation of a modular data center unit which will house” the high-performance computer “Rhea,” according to an announcement from the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That computer, or HPC, will be located at NOAA’s Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, W.Va. 

“The Rhea high-performance computer system adds needed computing capacity for NOAA to expand critical research that supports the nation’s climate resilience,” Michael C. Morgan, assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, said in the release.

Rhea, which is named for the Greek goddess known as the mother of gods, is equipped with “graphics processing units that will accelerate NOAA’s use of” artificial intelligence and machine learning in a variety of research areas, including weather forecasting and monitoring hurricane intensification. The new computing power will also be used to improve the prediction and forecasting of droughts, floods and wildfires through weather and climate models, the release said.

According to the announcement, the project “provides room for several additional modular data centers to be added in the future to further expand HPC speed and power for NOAA and other federal and private partners.” 

The computer will add to the agency’s existing Research and Development High Performance Computing System, which is composed of HPC centers in Colorado, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Specifically, Rhea will mean the addition of eight petaflops of computing speed to that system’s existing 35-petaflop capacity. A petaflop is a measurement of computer system performance that represents one quadrillion operations per second.

GDIT couldn’t immediately provide a comment on the announcement.