CREATE: Accelerating Defense Innovation With Computational Prototypes and High Performance Computers

Abstract

Today, rapid innovation in product development is essential to be competitive in any field. It is true for DoD acquisition as well as everyone else. To investigate the potential for computational prototypes and High Performance Computing (HPC) to enable product innovation in DoD acquisition programs, the U.S. Department of Defense HPC Modernization Program (DoD HPCMP) Office initiated the Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program in 2006 (Post et al., 2016). The CREATE goal is to develop and deploy physics-based HPC software applications for the design and analysis of military air craft, ships, and radio frequency antenna systems (and more recently ground vehicles) to enable DoD acquisition programs to improve acquisition outcomes through the construction and analysis of virtual prototypes for those systems. Development of the software applications began in 2008. Ten years later, the CREATE software tools are already beginning to enable DoD engineering organizations (government and industry) to accelerate the rate of innovation in major defense systems, and reduce the cost, time, and risks of acquisition programs for those systems. One aspect of this paradigm is that it enables the DoD to employ features of the Silicon Valley culture that facilitate rapid product innovation.