BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Virginia Tech is using a multi-million dollar contract award to accelerate research using supercomputers.

The Blacksburg school says the Air Force's Office of Scientific Research has awarded one of its engineering professors with a three-year, $3.5 million contact for the research.

The goal of the contract is to use supercomputers to increase the simulation speed of computations for a class of unmanned aerial vehicles called micro air vehicles.

Associate professor Wu Feng has pulled together a team of researchers from Virginia Tech and North Carolina State University for the effort.

Officials say the team's efforts should support the aerodynamic predictions for these increasingly tiny vehicles.

The contract has an option for a two-year extension worth another $2.5 million.