The Department of Defense supercomputing centers at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Resource and Development Center and the Stennis Space Center in Waveland will participate in an $82.7 million Army contract to accelerate Department of Defense high performance computing capabilities, according to information from U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran’s office.

ERDC’s and Stennis’ computers will perform $27.2 million of the contract, with ERDC receiving $14.7 million and Stennis getting $12.5 million.

ERDC is also tasked with providing overall management and technical support necessary to advance the Department’s high performance computing capabilities throughout the nation.  The estimated completion date for the contract work is June 2016.

Cochran has actively supported advanced computing capabilities in Mississippi, including the Army’s high performance computing missions at ERDC and the Navy’s missions at Stennis.

“This is an important award for our state,” Cochran, R-Miss, said. “This investment is a vote of confidence in the quality of research and development conducted in Mississippi, including advanced computing capabilities that save lives and money by keeping our warfighters ahead of our adversaries.

“I’m pleased that the ERDC and Stennis employees and communities have proven to be smart places to invest taxpayer dollars for the most intensive modeling and simulation missions of the Department of Defense,” he said.

While Mississippi sites were the largest total funding recipients, the Army announced Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and sites in Virginia and Maryland would also receive funding to carry out additional supercomputing research.

The ERDC supercomputing center is one of five Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers in the U.S. operated by the DOD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

“We’ve been a part of the supercomputing program for 23 years, now,” said Bobby Hunter, director of ERDC DOD supercomputer resource center. “Our mission is to provide supercomputing resources for Department of Defense scientists and engineers to perform modeling and simulation We help them accomplish what they would have to do in a physical world, a computational world, basically.”