The US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has unveiled its new supercomputer, Carpenter.

Carpenter, named after marine Medal of Honor recipient Corporal Kyle Carpenter, has nine petaflops of computing power and is housed in the Army Computing Lab in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The high-performance computing (HPC) cluster is an HPE EX 4000 supercomputer, featuring 277,248 AMD compute cores and 563 terabytes of memory.

Plans for the supercomputer were first shared by the ERDC in August 2022. According to that original announcement, the HPC would have two chips per node, providing each with 192 cores and 384 gigabytes of memory. Each node is connected via 200Gbps of bandwidth.

Cpl Kyle Carpenter is the youngest recipient of the Medal of Honor, receiving the commendation after he physically shielded his friend from a hand grenade attack in Afghanistan.

“Kyle Carpenter, along with previous supercomputing system namesakes LCpl Roy Wheat and CPT Ed Freeman, exemplifies the very reason why our mission is so critical,” said David Horner, director of the ERDC's Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). “The opportunity to help protect those who are willing to give everything to keep others safe is not something to take lightly.”

The ITL has named its HPC systems after Medal of Honor recipients for the past three years. So far, eight systems have been given an honorary name-sake.

The ERDC got its first supercomputer in 1990, and in 1992 formed its High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The HPCMP enables Department of Defense scientists and engineers to conduct a wide range of research, development, test, and evaluation activities.

The ERDC is also home to the Freeman supercomputer. The site also houses the Onyx supercomputer which was intended to be retired in August 2023, though is still included in the Top500 list as of November 2023, as well as Topaz, a 2015 HPC system.