CREATE: Acceptance and Adoption of Virtual Prototyping across the Defense R&D and Acquisition Communities

With an annual budget of nearly US600 billion, the US Department of Defense (DoD) is tasked with protecting the US and its allies and interests abroad against potential adversaries. It must accomplish these tasks in a globalized and highly interconnected world where the pace of technology is moving faster than the current time-consuming DoD acquisition systems can keep up with. Moving forward, the DoD must change these time-consuming paradigms and accelerate the pace of innovation. One way to do this is to shift to a virtual prototyping environment where the benefits of high-performance supercomputing and complex physics-based engineering software can expand the decision space and enable the DoD to field better systems faster, cheaper, and at less risk than previous methods. This is the goal of the Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) program. This issue of CiSE provides the third installment of articles relating to the history, formation, and ongoing work of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) CREATE program.