The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, today, will dedicate the latest addition to their supercomputing center. “Desch”, as its called, is an SGI Altix ICE8200 machine specially designed to exclusively support the translation of synthetic aperture radar data into high resolution three dimensional video images from the Gotcha radar system. The new system was named after Dayton engineer Joseph Desch, who led a team during World War II to build a machine destined to decipher Enigma-encrypted messages.
The goal is to provide an extremely high-fidelity, all-weather intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, or ISR, capability that can observe activity over an entire city,” said Dr. Dave Jerome, director of the AFRL’s Sensors Directorate at Wright-Patterson.
The new machine consists of 2,048 Intel Nehalem processors, three terabytes of memory and 87 terabytes of fast storage. Initial benchmarks mark the machine at around 23Tflops. The $2.2million system will be paired with a much smaller SGI Altix 450 shared memory machine. Desch’s little brother will be tasked with translating Desch’s high resolution images into a virtual mosaic.
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