 Officials held the coming online of two powerful new supercomputers at the US Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland as they cut the ribbon January 31st in front of employees and guests. And the first thing I want to do is extend my thanks to the DSRC staff, both the government and the contract staff and HPE, the system builder, for getting the systems installed, tested and operational for the user community. The systems, dubbed Hellfire and Centennial, are upgrades for the lab's DOD Supercomputing Resource Center and are part of a modernization program to bring new capabilities to Army researchers. Centennial and Hellfire were required as part of an acquisition we call TI-16 technology insertion 2016. They represent the first systems required with an increased focus on full system scale performance. These massive room size computers deliver lightning fast processing speeds and the power necessary to run complex simulations and computations. The DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Program typically invests in supercomputing upgrades every two years. Officials earn a constant state of planning for the complex system upgrades. Brainerd said they prepare for the improvements more than a year before a new system is expected. The lab's military deputy, Colonel Kevin Ellison, and the senior enlisted advisor, Sergeant Major Keith Taylor, represented leadership at the ceremony and open house event at the Supercomputing Resource Center. The center has an outreach program to inform and educate users across the DOD about the capabilities and resources available with Army supercomputers. The Centennial system augments the center's Excalibur supercomputer and extends the total unclassified high performance computing capability to 8.2 petaflops. A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed. One petaflop is a thousand trillion operations per second. From Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, David McNally, ARL TV.