Raytheon Completes Installation of Army's Largest High Performance Computer System

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Raytheon Completes Installation of Army's Largest High Performance Computer System
    RESTON, Va., Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/--
Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) has installed a supercomputer at the Army
Research Laboratory (ARL) that is about 4,000 times faster than the average
Pentium-based PC.
    As part of the Defense Department's High Performance Computing (HPC)
Modernization Program, the U.S. Army awarded Raytheon $14 million in April
2002 to procure a high performance computer system for the ARL Major Shared
Resource Center (MSRC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. Raytheon completed the
installation, integration and transition of the 768-processor, 1.3 GHz Power4-
based IBM supercomputer.  The system, which is composed of 28 cabinets,
arrived on June 21 and entered operation for pioneer users on June 27.
    The new system, an IBM Power4, more than doubles the computational
capability of the lab's high performance computing environment boosting it to
over 7.1 Teraflops (7.1 X 1012 floating point operations per second).
    "That means the system is able to run seven trillion math operations -
adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing - per second," said Dr. Prabu
Prabhakaran, Raytheon's Imagery and Geospatial Systems ARL HPC program
manager. Results from early benchmark code runs indicate the machine will
indeed provide the advertised and projected compute power for the center. On
several serial code runs, results from the new system versus the existing IBM
Power3 systems show anywhere from 3x to 5x speedup. These improvements are
very encouraging since they represent a greater than linear speedup, relative
to processor clock rates.
    The Raytheon integration team, working with ARL government counterparts,
elected to have the machine pre-staged at IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y.,
manufacturing facility, where any last-minute configuration issues could be
addressed and corrected before delivery to ARL.
    "By pre-staging the machine in Poughkeepsie, only local security and ARL-
specific configuration activities were necessary upon arrival.  This
facilitated the fast, six-day turnaround from physical delivery to operation
on site," said Mike McCraney, Raytheon integration director for the center.
    "The Raytheon and IBM installation team worked well together to get the
machine in front of our users as soon as possible.  Based on final tuning that
resulted from early pioneer runs, we expect the system to be released for
production use this month."
    This latest installation effort catapults the ARL MSRC into the top ten
among high performance computing centers in the world.   "The new system
should allow users to get jobs done in half the time. Things that might have
taken several weeks to run might now only take a day," said Prabhakaran.
    For the past six years, the Department of Defense has chosen Raytheon as
its integrator of choice for its supercomputers at Aberdeen.  Prabhakaran
points to Raytheon's performance and ability to maintain and operate the
system as the reasons why the DoD keeps coming back.
    "We've built trust and a good relationship with the customer," he said.
"But more importantly, we work together as a team."
    With headquarters in Lexington, Mass., Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) is a
global technology leader in defense, government and commercial electronics,
and business and special mission aircraft.

    Contact:
     Amy Ochs
     972.205.7490
SOURCE Raytheon Company
http://www.raytheon.com
CONTACT:
Amy Ochs of Raytheon Company, +1-972-205-7490