U. S. Army Unveils Powerful Supercomputer Named After Medal Of Honor Recipient Col.

The U. S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has unveiled a new supercomputer, named in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Col. Van Thomas Barfoot. This system marks the fourth supercomputer named after Mississippi natives who received the Medal of Honor. Col. Barfoot, an Edinburg, Mississippi native, demonstrated extraordinary bravery on May 23, 1944, near Carano, Italy. As a Technical Sergeant, he single-handedly took out two machine gun nests, captured 17 German soldiers, disabled a Mark VI tank with a bazooka, and assisted two seriously wounded men nearly one mile back to safety.

The Barfoot system is a powerful HPE Cray EX4000 supercomputer, boasting 212,000 compute cores and capable of over 9 quadrillion calculations per second. To put this into perspective, if 8 billion people were given a calculator and asked to perform one calculation every second without stopping, it would take them over two weeks to complete the number of calculations this computer can do in just one second.

This supercomputer will be used to simulate complex physical phenomena such as weather, structural performance, and aerodynamics, allowing researchers to model designs on the computer before testing them in the field.