GURU Generation 2 Supercomputer Will Accelerate Prototyping Process for Mach 5 Vehicles

July 21, 2025

California-based AI design and simulation startup MSBAI is developing a next generation version of its GURU platform to help accelerate the design of hypersonic vehicles. (Image: MSBAI)

MSBAI, a California-based AI design and simulation startup, has been awarded a $2 million Phase III contract by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for GURU Generation 2.

This sole-source award elevates MSBAI to the rare 'SBIR unicorn' status, signifying the DoD's recognition of GURU as an essential, unrivaled solution for national defense. This contract propels America's high-speed flight superiority by delivering hybrid intelligence for reliable automation of end-to-end workflows, slashing laborious setup times from hours or days to minutes and enabling the execution of thousands of simulations at scale.

Prototyping Mach 5-plus vehicles is prohibitively slow and costly; the only practical path to breakthrough designs is running massive suites of high-fidelity simulations. Yet setting up a single computational fluid dynamics (CFD) case still consumes hours — sometimes days — and scaling that to the hundreds or thousands required for full aerodynamic databases, flight envelopes, and control-surface schedules is impractical by hand.

GURU Generation 2 harnesses beyond-state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, inspired by cognitive frameworks like Global Workspace Theory, to achieve reliable automation. Its hierarchical architecture fuses symbolic reasoning with machine learning, autonomously navigating geometry preparation, grid generation, solver configuration, solution-adaptive mesh refinement to capture shock wave / boundary layer interaction and other complex physics, and visualization. This breakthrough enables DoD engineers to generate full aerodynamic databases, flight trajectories, and parametric studies of aerodynamic surfaces at machine speed, unlocking unprecedented design innovation for Mach 5+ flight, extreme maneuverability, and reusable systems.

Already demonstrated at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) with GURU Generation 1, the dual-use platform has reduced simulation failure rates from 88 percent to 2 percent. GURU Generation 2 will now scale across key Army, Navy, and Air Force supercomputers such as Blueback, Carpenter, Narwhal, and Raider, training skills agents to autonomously drive workflows in packages such as Salome, GMSH, NASA Refine for meshing; solvers including the CREATE CFD suite, SU2, and OpenFOAM; and ParaView for visualization.

The High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), a crown jewel of DoD's R&D resources, is the primary customer. Supporting over 5,000 defense scientists and engineers with premier supercomputers, networks, and expertise, HPCMP drives mission-critical advancements. Under Director Kelly Dalton's leadership, the program emphasizes AI integration and workforce empowerment to maintain U.S. superiority in hypersonics and emerging technologies. GURU injects beyond-state-of-the-art AI into HPCMP's ecosystem, democratizing access and boosting throughput for every user.

"This contract lets us plug GURU straight into the DoD's supercomputing nervous system," said Allan Grosvenor, CEO of MSBAI. "What once took a team hours or days to configure for a single hypersonic CFD simulation — riddled with failure risks — now takes minutes, and GURU can replicate that setup across thousands of cores, overcoming barriers to consistent success and data analysis, so America's engineers can explore a full spectrum of design modifications and flight conditions at machine speed, not human speed."

"The big thing we use these systems to do is modeling and simulation — we're trying to drive shorter timelines and accelerate," noted Bryon Foster, Chief of the AFRL DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC). "Tools like GURU help us run higher-fidelity calculations faster and cheaper, especially for regimes — like hypersonic flight — that can't be fully tested on a range."

For IL5 compliance, MSBAI partners with Inkit (www.inkit.com), a File Intelligence Platform that offers digital signature, secure document generation, and file storage capabilities.

This Phase III milestone positions MSBAI for further DoD investments in licenses and more features. MSBAI evolved the GURU technology through fundamental R&D conducted on DOE flagship exascale systems, including the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, running 2,000+ node jobs to advance its hybrid intelligence capabilities for engineering design and energy applications critical to the nation.

As America races to field next-generation hypersonic aviation and space launch technology, DoD's $2M investment in GURU ensures that every HPCMP user — from junior engineers to senior design teams — can spawn, manage, and analyze thousands of high-accuracy aerothermal simulations in the time it once took to hand-craft one.

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