Viglen delivers £400k contract for Ministry of Defence

Viglen, a British IT company, has delivered a £400k contract covering the supply and installation of a turnkey high performance computing (HPC) solution for the Nuclear Department of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Academy.

High performance computing is the only way to do reactor modelling effectively and to train the next generation of naval nuclear engineers.

Over 3,200 cores, supplemented with 48TB of high performance storage all connected by an Infiniband communication link, were installed at the Nuclear Department at HMS Sultan inGosport, Hampshire. The core count was split between 1,072 conventional Xeon E5-2600 series CPU Cores and 2,160 Xeon Phi Cores. As part of the solution Viglen supplied 36 x Intel Phi Coprocessors – one of the earliest and largest uses of this technology in the UK to date.

Commenting on the installation Dr Kirk Atkinson, Senior Lecturer Reactor Physics & HPC said, “Obtaining this capability was essential to support research for the next generation of submarine reactors.”

“We were very pleased that Viglen was able to deliver, install and commission all the equipment on time and within budget ahead of our year end as this was a key factor for us.”

TheDefenceAcademyis responsible for post-graduate education and the majority of training in command, staff, leadership, defence management, acquisition and technology for members of the UK Armed Forces and MOD Civil Servants.  Its Nuclear Department provides education, training, research and consultancy for service and civilian personnel working in support of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme.

Commenting on the contract, Viglen chief executive Bordan Tkachuk said; “This has been an extremely interesting project for us. Computer modelling has been used extensively in the design of nuclear-powered submarine reactor systems and continues to be used through-life to enhance and extend performance and to assure safety in operation and during their eventual decommissioning.”