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GCN Home > June 12, 2000 issue

At Aberdeen lab, fast computing has long history

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

ABERDEEN, Md.—In the building that housed the world’s first fully electronic computer, the Army Research Laboratory is building a digital arsenal.

The collection of big iron at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in northeastern Maryland includes three SGI Origin2000 computers that rank on the latest list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers (see story, Page 61). The lab’s new Cray SV1 scalable vector system is undergoing tests in another building.

As the lab’s workload has evolved from simple ballistic calculations to complex parallel simulations, its mission also has changed, said Charles J. Nietubicz, director of the Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) and chief of the High Performance Computing Division at Aberdeen.

Ten years ago, the staff focused on just keeping the machines running, said Nietubicz, a 30-year veteran of Army computing.

Now, with four brands of supercomputers and a theoretical capacity of 1.9 trillion calculations per second, lab staff members provide high-level software training to Defense Department researchers while keeping a high-bandwidth network running.

“It’s much more than computer cycles,” Nietubicz said.

The Aberdeen computer lab’s history began in 1947, when the team that developed Eniac moved the pioneering computer from the University of Pennsylvania to Building 328 at the proving ground.

Eniac was here

Eniac remained at the Maryland facility, then known as the Ballistic Research Laboratory, into the early 1950s.

The lab later commissioned several custom-built computers, including BRLESC-I, which in 1962 was the fastest in the world. In the late 1970s, production models began to come from Control Data Corp. and later Cray Research Inc., Nietubicz said.

As a reminder of the laboratory’s long history of state-of-the-art computing, a round, red Cray-2, the world’s fastest in 1985, now sits unplugged in the lobby of Building 328.

The Defense Department launched its High Performance Computing Modernization Program in the early 1990s, when Congress recognized that the military was losing its research edge, Nietubicz said.

For decades, the mathematical equations that describe the airflow around a complicated shape such as a military projectile had defied both the human brain and computers. Scientists could solve the equations only for simple spheres and cones.



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