[06/24/02] Long known for its history, Vicksburg is fast becoming more prominent on the world stage for technology.

Computers some of the most advanced in the world are located in Vicksburg at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Waterways Experiment Station.

New global supercomputing rankings, rating whole systems and individual machines, list ERDC as high as 15th or 30th in the world.

Vicksburg’s history with computers began when the first IBM machine was installed at Waterways Experiment Station in the 1950s. It was to serve the research labs at the federal preserve created in the aftermath of the 1927 Flood.

In the years since, the computing power at what is now called ERDC has grown. The computing power is now housed in its own laboratory, the Jamie C. Whitten Information Technologies Laboratory.

“Basically, it is a Department of Defense supercomputing center,” said Wayne Stroup, a public affairs officer.

The computers have many purposes, but among them are modeling, designing and testing everything from locks and dams to jet engines. They can “predict” the aging characteristics of metals, for example, or calculated complex stresses.

The ITL was formed as the Army Supercomputer Center in 1989 and the name was changed to the High Performance Computing Major Shared Resource Center in 1993.

Stroup said the center is used by the engineers and scientists at WES, but it is also available to organizations.

“It supports the research of the Army, Navy and Air Force,” Stroup said.

A list of the 500 top computers in the world released last week by the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim shows the machines at ITL at rankings from 30th in the world to 156th.

That list, Stroup said, “apparently references the capability and ranking of individual supercomputers.”

And indeed, ITL has some of the most powerful individual computers in the world. The machines are an SGI Origin 3000 with 512 processors, a Cray T3E with 816 processors and a Compaq SC40 with 256 processors.

And that’s not all the center has.

“We are currently doing acceptance testing on a fourth system, a 508-processor Compaq SC45,” Stroup said.

The typical, off-the-shelf, home computer has one processor.

But even without that capability, the ITL is listed as the 15th most powerful computer system in the world as ranked by Gunter Ahrendt Purchasing Consulting. Gunter Ahrendt is a consulting firm that works companies, organizations and individuals on the purchase of computers and other goods and services.

Stroup said when the new Compaq machine is fully functional, it will give the system a capacity of 3.86 teraFLOPS. That means the system is capable of performing about 3.86 trillion calculations per second.

The supercomputing center here is one of four Department of Defense centers and was the first one established. The other three are at the Naval Oceanographic Office at the Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi, at the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio and at the Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.

There are other top-ranked computers in the Southeast, including the IBM Power4 System at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee which is ranked No. 8 in the world and a computer at Mississippi State University that is ranked No. 127. The Oak Ridge system has a speed of 2.3 teraFLOPS now and a theoretical speed of 4.5 teraFLOPS.