Grace: USNA's supercomputer

Grace

Named after Grace Hopper, a Rear Admiral in the Navy and a pioneer of computer science, Grace is a Cray XC30 system supervised by the Naval Academy's Center for HPC Education & Research. The University of Maryland hosts and helps manage the system through a new research partnership.

Grace has 1248 physical CPU cores across 52 nodes with 128GB of RAM per node. It also has 8 GPUs with 64GB per node, bringing the total amount of RAM to over 7 terabytes. Grace's hardware was chosen to be architecturally compatible with several larger DoD systems, making it easier for researchers to develop their applications on Grace and migrate seamlessly to DoD systems for even greater scaling.

Grace is the direct result of the assistance and partnership with the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Office and the Office of Naval Research. 

Purpose and Use

The primary goal and purpose of Grace is to engage midshipmen in the latest research and education tools available. The computer science department now offers a senior-level elective on high performance computing in which students can test what they've learned on Grace itself. Beyond the classroom, Grace is also utilized by researchers across a host of academic departments at the Naval Academy. Research topics range from simulating fluid mechanics to neural networks to efficient algorithms for massive text datasets. 

Contact 

Curious to learn more? Please visit the Naval Academy's Center for HPC Education & Research.