By Giulia Bernacchi
The US Department of Defense has contracted with Parallel Works to establish a unified platform connecting military supercomputing centers with commercial cloud infrastructure.
Parallel Works' ACTIVATE High Security Platform will function as a control layer linking the DoD's Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers with approved cloud environments. This allows researchers, engineers, and acquisition teams to access computing resources through a single interface.
The platform is designed to support computationally intensive workloads, including modeling and simulation, engineering analysis, AI development, and digital engineering.
Users can shift workloads between government-owned systems and commercial cloud resources depending on capacity and operational requirements.
A primary objective involves providing DoD users with additional computing capacity while enabling evaluation of emerging cloud-based technologies before integration into military supercomputing centers.
Keith Obenschain, Chief Technology Officer at the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program, stated: "AI-driven warfare and the ramp to digital modernization are demanding far more model-sharing options than legacy infrastructure can provide. These capabilities are critical for accelerating mission outcomes."
Naval Research Laboratory Deployment
The first implementation has occurred at the Naval Research Laboratory, where the platform supports weather forecasting workloads. By automating workload management across multiple computing environments, the laboratory aims to improve processing speed, reliability, and operational continuity for computationally demanding models.
The project serves as an initial demonstration of the platform's potential application across the DoD's broader computing workloads.