> Obviously, although I have doubts that the computations being performed by these "GPU solvers" really require a modern custom-built GPU and couldn't have been done on FPGAs or arrays of microcontrollers from the 80s.

Here's a talk by the guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYA0f6R5KAI

The Cray 2 could do <2 gigaflops. So a single simulation with 10,000 points per side at 1 microsecond timesteps for .1 seconds with ~50 flops per cell-step would have taken 79 years to run, assuming the Cray had 50 cycle fetch/store times. Engineers need to run lots of simulations to come up with a working design. And that's just simulating something around the scale of a single nozzle- you'll need to be doing sims for a 40 meter tall stage as it flips around.

Also, the cray had a 256 Mword memory. So you could only store a single timestep of a grid of 400x400x400 cells anyway. The supercomputers of the 80s were really just not very useful for things like this.