US Army Puts a Supercomputer in a Shipping Container

Portable system will deliver AI as well as other HPC-based services.

The US Army is taking high-performance computing (HPC) into the field. The Army Engineering and Support Center in Huntsville, Alabama, announced that it has procured an HPC system housed in a shipping container. The $12 million IBM system will include an on-board uninterruptible power supply, chilled water cooling, and a fire suppression system. The system comes with 22 nodes for machine learning training workloads, 128 nodes for inferencing workloads, three solid-state filesystems totaling 1.3PB, and 100Gbps InfiniBand. According to an article at the Data Center Dynamics site, the system probably won’t be stationed at the front lines of the battlefield, but it could be used for rapid deployment to any of the army’s 800 bases around the world.