Army Evaluating HMMWV Performance, Future Electric Systems Using Software from Interactive Supercomputing

Energy Resource, Dec 18, 2006

ENERGY RESOURCE-18 December 2006-Army Evaluating HMMWV Performance, Future Electric Systems Using Software from Interactive Supercomputing(C)2006 JeraOne - http://www.jeraone.com

U.S. Army and vehicle designers will be using Interactive Supercomputing Inc.'s (ISC) Star-P software to help evaluate the performance and reliability of next-generation military vehicles, including possible development of plug-in electric systems.

ISC received a subcontract from the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) to transform its internally developed ground vehicle performance and reliability software to run on parallel computers. TARDEC is the nation's laboratory for advanced military ground systems and automotive technology.

The first phase of the project is to predict the reliability of the HMMWV M-1097, the Army's biggest "Humvee"-class vehicle designed to provide safe transport of troops, equipment and cargo in rugged, hostile environments. If successful, the research could contribute to future development in robotic, plug-in electric and other advanced vehicle combat systems.

Until now, running full simulations of vehicle computer models in serial mode has taken too long to be fully utilized in the acquisition process, even when running on state-of-the-art serial hardware. TARDEC hopes to cut the time to perform computionationally intensive simulations by orders of magnitude with Star-P, the company said.

Star-P is an interactive parallel computing platform that will enable TARDEC scientists to use their existing serial models developed in C or FORTRAN languages, automatically parallelizing the code run on parallel servers or clusters. Star-P lets users continue to work with their preferred tools, languages and desktop environments, shielding them from the programming complexities of parallel systems.

"TARDEC's mission is to research, develop and integrate advanced technology into ground systems and support equipment for all U.S. Armed Forces," said Ilya Mirman, vice president of marketing at ISC. "We look forward to helping TARDEC scientists accelerate this important mission."

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