The US Department of Defense (DoD) has contracted to Parallel Works to provide a unified platform connecting military supercomputing centers with commercial cloud infrastructure.
Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE High Security Platform will serve as a control layer linking the DoD’s Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers with approved cloud environments, allowing researchers, engineers, and acquisition teams to access computing resources through a single interface.
The platform is intended to support computationally intensive workloads, including modeling and simulation, engineering analysis, AI development, and digital engineering.
Users will be able to shift workloads between government-owned systems and commercial cloud resources depending on capacity and operational requirements.
A key objective is to provide DoD users with additional computing capacity while allowing them to evaluate emerging cloud-based technologies before those capabilities are integrated into military supercomputing centers.
“AI-driven warfare and the ramp to digital modernization are demanding far more model-sharing options than legacy infrastructure can provide,” said Keith Obenschain, Chief Technology Officer at the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program, which awarded the contract.
“These capabilities are critical for accelerating mission outcomes with the speed, scale and complexity of today’s operational challenges.”
Naval Research Laboratory Deployment
The first implementation under the contract has been carried out at the Naval Research Laboratory, where the platform is being used to support 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 a wider range of the DoD’s computing workloads.
