From Interstate 675 to the I-way
The Aeronautical Systems Center's Major Shared Resource Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force base, Ohio, last month installed three new supercomputers that will support a scientific research network of users throughout the Defense Department. The Cray C90, Cray J90 and the IBM SP will boost computer power of the center, one of four MSRCs being overhauled to handle the bulk of DOD's future supercomputing needs. Nichols Research Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., won the contract this spring
The Aeronautical Systems Center's Major Shared Resource Center at Wright-Patterson Air
Force base, Ohio, last month installed three new supercomputers that will support a
scientific research network of users throughout the Defense Department.
The Cray C90, Cray J90 and the IBM SP will boost computer power of the center, one of
four MSRCs being overhauled to handle the bulk of DOD's future supercomputing needs.
Nichols Research Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., won the contract this spring to beef up the
center [GCN, May 13, Page 4].
The supercomputers' components arrived via truck. With the help of staff from IBM and
Cray Research Inc. of Eagan, Minn., the 88th Communications Group assembled the machines
on the center's computer room floor.
The Defense Information Systems Agency is looking for a new integration manager for the
Defense Message System. Last month, Wayne Deloria left the post to become director of
government programs for Enterprise Solutions Ltd.
The Westlake Village, Calif., company is one of the subcontractors to DMS contractor
Lockheed Martin Corp. Deloria said he will promote ESL's messaging package, EXM-Mail, and
other tools to government users, especially those that run Apple Macintosh OS and Sun
Solaris platforms.
DISA chiefs realize that many people would like to tap into the finished X.500
directory planned for the Defense Message System. As an entire record, the
directory--which will contain a multitude of information about every DOD user and every
user's system capabilities--probably would amount to a classified product, DMS program
manager Tom Clarke said.
"So how do we make it safe?" he mused last month during a briefing at the
Canadian Embassy in Washington. His answer: "We make it unclassified but
access-controlled." To search the directory, users will have to sign in before
browsing. "We can't let anyone just come in and surf," Clarke said.
To make this less onerous to legitimate users, Enterprise Solutions is working on a
directory user agent that would let users download directory information to a local
directory cache on their PCs.
DOD and the Joint Center for International Security Studies at the University of
California at Davis will be testing a secure intranet prototype.
The DOD Virtual Policy Center project is one of the first applications to run at the
Sun Technology Research and Excellence Center, which includes computer labs set up by Sun
Mircrosystems Inc. at the Davis campus and at the university's Davis Washington Center in
the nation's capital.
The centers house Sparc 5 workstations running Solaris 2, SunScreen firewall software
and the Sun's ShowMe videoconferencing package. For the DOD pilot, military officials and
academics will use the prototype intranet to host discussions on security and Defense
policies.
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