HPE signs multi-billion dollar NSA computing deal

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has won a 10-year contract worth $2 billion to supply high-performance computing systems to the US National Security Agency (NSA).

According to HPE, the systems will be used mainly for tackling compute-intensive analytics workloads, to support the agency’s forecasting and analysis needs. 

“Implementing artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics capabilities on massive sets of data increasingly requires High Performance Computing (HPC) systems” said Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and Mission Critical Solutions (MCS) at HPE.

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This is NSA’s second recent billion-dollar contract, and comes not long after the agency awarded a $10 billion deal to Amazon Web Services (AWS) reportedly to help migrate its classified data repository to the cloud.

HPC as a service

Under the HPE contract, the enterprise IT company will build and manage the system, and the NSA will pay to use it as a service. 

According to HPE, the company will deliver HPC systems as a service through the HPE GreenLake platform. 

GreenLake is HPE’s pay-per-use, cloud platform that, compared to traditional HPC deployments, promises to deliver significantly reduced complexity and costs.

According to Hotward, GreenLake, which was announced late last year, has been a hit with customers who like the platform’s computing prowess with the ease, simplicity, and agile management of the cloud’s as-a-service model. 

As part of the contract, HPE will build and manage the complete solution, which includes a combination of HPE Apollo systems and HPE ProLiant servers, and house it inside a QTS data center. 

The company says the NSA will start using the service in 2022.

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