ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. - The Army announced a new supercomputer for its scientists and engineers to conduct a wide range of focused research and development, test and evaluation, and acquisition engineering activities.

The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center will name the supercomputer Fran, in honor of one of the original six ENIAC programmers.

The ENIAC, which stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the world's first general purpose scientific computer, which began operation on Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1947.

The HPE Cray EX System is named for Frances "Fran" Bilas. It is a single, large, unclassified, high-performance computer, emphasizing standard compute nodes.

Officials said it will be the first system in the new Army AI Innovations Institute, commonly known as A2I2, facility and is scheduled for delivery in December 2024.

According to Jamie Stack, ARL DSRC customer service director, Fran also has the first NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs at DEVCOM ARL, specifically designed for generative artificial intelligence, large language models and HPC workloads.

"Fran will provide ARL researchers access to one of the largest unclassified computing resources," Stack said. "It provides a diverse computing resource as well with large memory compute nodes, visualization nodes, dedicated AI/machine learning nodes and a large number of dedicated compute nodes."

With the arrival of Fran later this year, the center will have platforms on the floor celebrating all six original ENIAC programmers: Frances Elizabeth "Betty" (Snyder) Holberton, Betty Jean "Jean" (Jennings) Bartik, Kathleen "Kay" (McNulty) Mauchly Antonelli, Ruth (Lichterman) Teitelbaum, Marlyn (Wescoff) Meltzer and Frances V. "Fran" (Bilas) Spence.

"Decades passed before the contributions of the ENIAC programmers to computing history were honored," said Matt Goss, ARL DSRC director. "Fittingly enough, it was a suggestion of our recently retired deputy director, Lee Ann Brainard, and began with our Betty system. In September 2023, we held a ribbon cutting ceremony for five of the systems, and descendants of three of the families participated. The arrival of Fran closes this chapter in the ARL DSRC recognition of our heritage."

Goss also noted that Fran places the ARL DSRC in a unique position with six computing platforms on the floor at once, and is the largest computer ever hosted by ARL.

The HPCMP provides the Department of Defense supercomputing capabilities, high-speed network communications and computational science expertise that enable DOD scientists and engineers.

This partnership puts advanced technology in the hands of U.S. forces more quickly, less expensively, and with greater certainty of success.

Today, the HPCMP provides a comprehensive advanced computing environment for the DOD that includes unique expertise in software development and system design, powerful high performance computing systems, and a premier wide-area research network. The HPCMP is managed on behalf of the DOD by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi.