Army Research Laboratory
Major Shared Resource Center

Welcome to the DoD Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD. Aberdeen Proving Ground is located in northern Maryland, about 35 miles northeast of Baltimore.

The ARL MSRC encompasses the site where the world's first high-speed, electronic, automatic computer - the ENIAC - was housed and operated. The ENIAC - Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer - was designed and built at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania with funding and cooperation from the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps. It was installed at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, an ARL predecessor organization, in 1947. The commercial high performance computing capability now being made available in the ARL MSRC is over one hundred million times that of its historic root, the ENIAC. The defense research and development community is credited with many significant contributions to science and technology.

In August, 1996, the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program MSRC acquisition process was completed with Raytheon E-Systems being awarded the integration contract to modernize the ARL HPC assets. The ARL MSRC is the fourth and final of the DoD MSRCs. This contract, with total life-cycle value of $169 Million, is an 8-year vehicle that establishes an initial HPC performance level (PL1) and provides for two phased upgrades: 1) to the performance capability of three times the PL1 performance (PL2), and 2) to ten times the PL1 performance (PL3).

PL1 hardware and commensurate infrastructure are slated to be made operational early through mid CY97, and provides individual modern, leading-edge computational capability at each of Unclassified, Secret, and Secret/SAP processing classifications. Throughout the first half of CY97, the ARL MSRC website information will be updated frequently and all are invited to visit the pages frequently to remain abreast of the most recent events.

The ARL MSRC is staffed with an integrated mix of government and contractor personnel. Management, oversight, and government technical and engineering staff are provided by the High Performance Computing Division (HPCD) of ARL's Corporate Information and Computing Center (CICC). Contractor staffing is provided by the integrator, E-Systems, in conjunction with their corporate and university partners for the ARL MSRC effort.

Defense research, development, test or evaluation users who are interested in obtaining an account on any of the ARL MSRC computational resources should contact their local organization's account approval authority. In addition to the normal account approval process, users who desire accounts on classified resources, must have appropriate network encryption equipment and execute an accreditation and operation agreement with the ARL. DoD MSRC resources are shared among Army, Navy, Air Force, and other DoD agency elements in a nominal 30/30/30/10 split, respectively. These allocations are further divided within each agency based on user requirements. At the ARL MSRC, this allocation is effected by the HPCServer software on a not-to-exceed basis, while allowing any otherwise-idle cycles to be utilized outside the allocation scheme.

Visitor Number: 5