New Air Force 3.1 Petaflop Thunder Supercomputer helping develop hypersonic vehicles and railguns

The Air Force Research Laboratory officially presented its latest supercomputer acquisition in a ribbon-cutting ceremony Dec. 14, 2015.

The Thunder supercomputer is part of the DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. It joins two other large systems — Spirit and Lightning — already located at the center. The Silicon Graphics Incorporated ICE X is named Thunder after the Air Force’s P-47 Thunderbolt and its subsequent namesake, the A-10 aircraft, both of which have played key roles in significant armed conflict for the U.S. military.

Since beginning operations in October, Thunder has solved complex simulations ranging from hypersonic flight to the limitations of a futuristic electromagnetic rail gun.

Aerospace engineer Susan Cox-Stouffer used computational fluid dynamic simulations on the AFRL supercomputers to test the X-51 Waverider, a hypersonic vehicle that reached more than five times the speed of sound during flight tests over the Pacific Ocean.

"You can’t design these on the back of an envelope," she said. "It takes a lot of simulations."

The newest supercomputer is the 21st fastest high-performance computing system in the world, and can calculate about 3.1 petaFLOPS, or 3,126,240,000,000,000 floating point operations per second, according to AFRL.