To produce the next generation of aircraft, the aero industry needs next-generation CFD tools and HPC systems. That’s why Zenotech has recently completed benchmarking activity in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leader in the aerospace industry, Airbus. The work seeks to evaluate the current performance of the AWS Cloud HPC with an Aerospace Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) workload.  

The results of this activity are particularly pertinent to the aeronautical sector. With simulation complexity in the aero industry increasing as they strive to meet more stringent environmental standards and optimise performance, the demand for High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems is also on the rise. This is a growing trend as aerospace companies look for the next generation of CFD tools and the high-performance computing (HPC) systems to run them. 

Airbus provided their XRF1 simulation challenge as the test case, which represents the typical complexity used internally by Airbus for their production aircraft. We used our scalable computational fluid dynamics product, zCFD as the CFD software and ran the simulations on a variety of AWS hardware platforms. The price and performance of the cloud options were compared with an on-premise supercomputer. 

We generated a series of CFD meshes for the XRF1 case and carried out scaling tests from single nodes up to clusters of over 3500+ CPU cores as well as examining GPU and ARM performance.

The results of this work have been published as a whitepaper, “Benchmarking AWS and HPC Services Next-generation Aerospace Modelling and Simulation”. The paper is designed to guide you through the complexity of CFD in the aero sector and how new HPC architectures can help the industry meet future challenges. Read the whitepaper here. 

This work was carried out as part of the ATI and Innovate UK project “Aerospace Cloud Services”.