Orion turns up the speed at MSU

In mid-July, Mississippi State University will begin operating a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-funded high-performance computer (HPC), named Orion, to support NOAA research and development in environmental, weather and climate modeling, and autonomous vehicle design and operation. The new computer will also be used by researchers and students working with NOAA, MSU and the Northern Gulf Institute, NOAA’s cooperative institute based at MSU that includes five other academic partners in Mississippi, Florida and Alabama. NOAA provided MSU with grants totaling $22M over the last two years to purchase, install and run the supercomputer. The Dell-EMC system will add 5 petaflops of computing capacity to NOAA’s existing research high performance computing capacity of 10.5 petaflops, currently operating at centers in Boulder, Colo.; Fairmont, W.Va.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and Princeton, N.J. Orion is located at the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park adjacent to campus. It is nearly 10 times faster than MSU’s previous computing system, and is able to conduct 5 quadrillion calculations per second. HPC has been used for simulations of a fully configured submarine for the Navy; military ground vehicle designs; data analytics for the Department of Energy; cybersecurity research for Homeland Security; and ocean and storm surge modeling for NOAA. (Source: NOAA 06/19/19) Mississippi is home to two of the five Defense Department Supercomputing Resource Centers: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s Research and Development Center in Vicksburg and the Navy DSRC at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Hancock County.