Credit: GE Aerospace
Since 2022, GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE) has competed successfully for more than 3 million supercomputing hours under a U.S. Department of Energy peer-reviewed proposal process, incuding time on two of the three American exascale supercomputers — Frontier and Aurora.
This makes the company one of the largest users of DOE exascale-class HPC systems, which GE Aerospace has used to support its develop commercial aviation jet engine technologies.
The comany said the systems allow their engineers to conduct simulations that would not be possible using previous-generation supercomputers.
GE Aerospace is using the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to model integration of the Open Fan engine architecture within an airplane, a project conducted in collaboration with Boeing and NASA. It was awarded hours on both Frontier and the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory through DOE’s INCITE program, under which private industry competes for supercomputing hours.
Aurora is an Intel-HPE Cray EX supercomputer, the second DOE system to break the exascale barrier (see TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers). Additionally, ALCF awards time on Polaris, an HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10+ system that delivers 44 petaflops of Tensor Core FP64 performance. TheOLCF’s system is the 2 exaflops peak Frontier, an HPE Cray EX supercomputer that debuted in May 2022 as the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Frontier was made available to researchers in 2022, Aurora was made available to researchers last month.
Engineers are studying the aerodynamics of an Open Fan engine mounted on an aircraft wing in simulated flight conditions. This allows the engine design to be optimized for additional efficiency, noise, and other performance benefits. Open Fan architecture is a new jet engine design engines that removes the traditional casing, allowing for a larger fan size with less drag to improve fuel efficiency.
GE Aerospace, Niskayuna, NY, said it has worked with the Department of Energy for more than a decade on using HPC for industrial design for flight.
Open Fan is one of a suite of technologies being advanced through CFM International’s Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines (RISE) program. CFM International, a 50-50 joint company between GE Aerospace and Safran Aircraft Engines. Unveiled in 2021, the program has more than 250 tests completed. The CFM RISE program targets more than 20 better fuel efficiency compared to the most efficient commercial engines in service today.
“Developing next-generation aviation technologies for a safer, more energy efficient industry requires game-changing engineering capabilities,” said Arjan Hegeman, GE Aerospace vice president of commercial future of flight engineering. “GE Aerospace is proud of its continued collaborations with the U.S. Department of Energy to advance the future of flight and keep one of the largest U.S. export industries competitive globally,”
