The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg will be holding a dedication and ribbon cutting for the newest HPE EX 4000 supercomputer, named Carpenter, in honor of retired Marine Cpt. William “Kyle” Carpenter. Carpenter is a Medal of Honor recipient and a Mississippi native.  The dedication will take place on Dec. 12 at 10 a.m. at the Information Technology Lab’s Main Auditorium.

The organization’s newest supercomputer, an HPE EX 4000, has AMD EPYC processors, 9 petaFLOPS of compute capability (9 quadrillion calculations per second) and 277,248 compute cores. Three years ago, the decision was made to honor Mississippi-native Medal of Honor recipients by naming high-performance computing systems after them.

This system is named Carpenter in honor of the youngest living Medal of Honor recipient and Mississippi native, retired Marine Cpl. Kyle Carpenter, who will be in attendance at the ceremony.

While serving in Afghanistan, Carpenter was severely wounded while fearlessly shielding a fellow marine from a daylight hand grenade. He survived the attack and saved his partner’s life.

He is one of only eight living recipients to be awarded a Medal of Honor for actions in Afghanistan. This award was presented by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2014.