Wright Patterson Air Force Base has a new advanced problem solver for future military systems and weapons. It’s called the Flyer, named in honor of Wilbur and Orville Wright and their research in aerodynamics.
The Flyer is the Pentagon’s latest supercomputer. It has more than 186,000 cores able to process millions of advanced calculations in a few seconds.
David Shahady, deputy director of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Digital Capabilities Directorate, equated the abilities of this unit to a pop-culture sci-fi character.
“If you've ever seen the movie "Avengers," in that movie, Dr. Strange thinks about a hundred million possibilities of how the end game could work out,” Shahady said. “That's what our computer can do.”
It's technical stats include: 931 nodes, 186,624 cores, 232 graphic processing units, 738.9 terabytes of memory and 19.4 petabytes of usable disk storage.
In layman’s terms, the Flyer can calculate in one day what would take the average laptop 500 years to process.
Over the next five years, this $20 million unit will operate almost around the clock running military and commercial digital simulations for a range of research problems. Eliminating the need and the expense of repeatedly building and testing physical models.
“It's extreme cost savings to the government and to the taxpayers,” said Jonathan Thompson, technical director of the Air Force Research Laboratory Department of Defense Supercomputing Center. . “If we can prove it in here, we don't have to spend all the money to build something, test it. It doesn't work right. Build, test, build, test. We can do it all virtually in digital engineering. And that's a lot cheaper.”
U.S. Rep Mike Turner called the Flyer an investment to keep American soldiers safe.
"It will assist the Air Force in both researching the capabilities that our adversaries have and how do we design systems to defeat them, how do design our systems that give us the capabilities to deter our adversaries in the future, and how we design strategies and our own plans for the future to ensure that not only the United States but our allies remain safe," Turner said.
The Air Force is also using the Waverider supercomputer. Its primary function is artificial intelligence and machine learning development and training. This will enable researchers to design complex simulations that can perform natural language processing, computer vision and autonomous system design. The Waverider can execute deep learning algorithms faster and more efficiently.
Both support the military, aerospace and defense technologies. Some applications can also be applied to commercial industries.
The Flyer and Waverider are among eleven supercomputers housed in high security areas at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
