High Performance Computing Modernization Program

The High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) is a program within the United States Department of Defense started in 1993 to modernize DOD's supercomputer infrastructure. In FY2012 the program transitioned from the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering to the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology. The director is John West; he was preceded by Cray J. Henry.

Defense Research and Engineering Network
The Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) — a high-speed national computer network for computational research, engineering, and testing — is a significant program within the HPCMP.

The DREN is the United States Department of Defense’s research and engineering computer network. The DREN is a high-speed, high-capacity, low-latency nationwide computer network for computational scientific research, engineering, and testing in support of the DoD's Science and Technology and Test and Evaluation communities. The DREN connects scientists and engineers at the HPCMP's geographically dispersed high performance computing (HPC) user sites, including the five DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers — hosted by the Army Research Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, and the Air Force Research Laboratory — along with more than 150 user sites at other government laboratories, test centers, universities, and industrial locations.

The DREN wide area networking (WAN) capability is provided under a commercial contract, currently awarded to CenturyLink. It has been awarded in the past to AT&T, MCI/WorldCom, and Verizon. The DREN WAN service provider has built DREN as a virtual private network based on its commercial infrastructure. It currently supports IPv4 and IPv6 at bandwidths from DS-3 (45 Mbit/s) at some user sites up to Optical Carrier-48c (2.488 Gbit/s) and 10-gigabit Ethernet connections at selected high performance computing centers.

In 2003, DREN was designated the Department of Defense's first IPv6 network by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks & Information Integration.