Aerospace & Space

Aerospace and space programs operate under constraints that few other industries face: regulatory certification requirements with zero tolerance for error, design cycles measured in years rather than months, and physics phenomena — compressible flow, structural flutter, electromagnetic scattering — that demand extreme simulation fidelity. High-performance computing is not an efficiency tool in this sector; it is a prerequisite. Every kilogram of aircraft weight, every decibel of cabin noise, and every point of drag coefficient that simulation can address before prototype testing translates directly into program cost and certification timeline.

Key Workloads

Aerospace simulation spans a broad spectrum of physics, each with distinct software ecosystems and HPC resource profiles.

Software Stack and HPC Requirements

High-fidelity aerodynamic simulations — particularly Large Eddy Simulation (LES) for turbulent wake or cavity flows — are the most resource-intensive workloads in aerospace. A single LES run on a full-aircraft geometry at realistic Reynolds numbers can require 1,024–8,192 cores running continuously for 24–96 hours.

Application Areas

Aerodynamics and CFD

Wing aerodynamics, nacelle integration, high-lift system analysis, and full-aircraft drag prediction require dense, high-quality computational meshes and long transient runs. Transonic flow around wing-body junctions, where mixed subsonic and supersonic regions interact, demands fine mesh resolution and careful solver settings that amplify compute costs.

Turbine and compressor internal flow analysis introduces additional complexity: rotating machinery requires sliding mesh or MRF (Multiple Reference Frame) approaches, multistage interactions require full-annulus models, and aeroelastic coupling requires co-simulation between fluid and structural solvers. Core counts of 256–2,048 with InfiniBand interconnect are routine for production turbomachinery CFD.

Aeroacoustics — predicting airframe noise, engine fan tone, and landing gear noise — couples CFD with acoustic propagation solvers (e.g., Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings method). These analyses are computationally intensive and typically occupy high-memory nodes due to the volume of time-history data retained during transient runs.

Structural Analysis and Certification

Airworthiness certification under FAR Part 25 (transport aircraft) or CS-25 (EASA equivalent) mandates structural demonstration across a defined flight envelope. Finite element models of primary structure often exceed 10–50 million elements when composite layup, fastener modeling, and contact interfaces are included. These models require nodes with 512 GB–2 TB RAM to avoid disk-swapping performance collapse.

Key structural workloads include:

• Normal modes and flutter analysis: Large sparse eigenvalue problems; MSC Nastran SOL 103, SOL 145
• Static aeroelasticity: Coupled aerodynamic and structural response; SOL 144/146
• Crash and impact simulation: Bird strike (FAR 25.571), hail impact, ditching — LS-DYNA with SPH or mesh-free formulations
• Fatigue and damage tolerance: Crack propagation under spectrum loading; Abaqus XFEM or FRANC3D coupling

Electromagnetic Analysis

Aircraft and spacecraft carry dense antenna populations — communication, navigation, surveillance, and electronic warfare — whose placement must be validated against co-site interference, radiation pattern distortion, and structural blockage. FEKO and CST Studio Suite are the industry-standard tools for this work.

Radar cross-section (RCS) computation is a specialized but growing workload, particularly for defense-aerospace programs. Full-aircraft RCS simulation at X-band frequencies requires electrically large models that can demand 256–1,024 cores and significant memory. RCS work for military programs frequently involves ITAR/EAR-controlled data, making cloud infrastructure legally non-compliant — on-premise clusters are mandatory.

Typical HPC Configuration

Aerospace HPC Cluster — Reference Architecture
├── Login / Pre-/Post-Processing Nodes (2×)
│   └── Dual EPYC 9354, 256 GB DDR5, 10 GbE to users
├── CFD Compute Nodes (32–128 units)
│   └── Dual AMD EPYC 9654 (192 cores/node), 512 GB DDR5
│       → InfiniBand NDR200 per node
├── High-Memory Structural Nodes (4–8 units)
│   └── Dual EPYC 9754 + 4× 256 GB LRDIMM = 2 TB/node
│       → For Nastran large-model runs
├── GPU Nodes (4–16 units)
│   └── 4× NVIDIA H100 SXM5 per node
│       → FEKO GPU, ANSYS Fluent GPU solver, EM workloads
└── Parallel Storage
    └── Lustre or BeeGFS, NVMe + SAS hybrid
        Aggregate bandwidth: 20–100 GB/s
        Capacity: 500 TB–2 PB usable

Network: InfiniBand NDR400, fat-tree or dragonfly topology
Scheduler: SLURM with fair-share and priority queues

MPI tuning for aerospace solvers — particularly process pinning, NUMA-aware process placement, and message coalescing for ANSYS Fluent — can reduce wall-clock time by 15–30% on the same hardware without any code changes.

Mevasis Aerospace HPC Services

Mevasis has delivered HPC infrastructure to aerospace OEMs, tier-1 suppliers, research institutions, and defense integrators in Turkey and the region. Our engineering team understands the regulatory and security context that distinguishes aerospace compute from general engineering workloads.

• Workload profiling: Benchmark your existing Fluent, Nastran, or FEKO jobs to determine bottlenecks and right-size hardware
• Turnkey cluster installation: Hardware procurement, InfiniBand fabric design, SLURM or PBS Pro configuration, storage tuning
• On-premise deployment for ITAR workloads: Air-gapped or physically isolated clusters for defense-aerospace programs requiring data sovereignty
• Solver optimization: MPI process mapping, InfiniBand tuning, Fluent parallel I/O configuration, Nastran DMAP customization
• HPC Rental: Short-term burst capacity for certification campaigns, bid-phase simulations, or peak-load overflow — without capital expenditure
• HPC Consulting: Ongoing performance monitoring, job scheduling optimization, and simulation bottleneck resolution

Frequently Asked Questions

How many cores are needed for full-aircraft CFD? It depends heavily on mesh size and solver fidelity. A RANS analysis of a clean wing-body configuration at 10–20 million cells typically runs well on 64–256 cores. A full-aircraft LES or time-accurate RANS with a 200M+ cell mesh may require 1,024–4,096 cores to achieve useful turnaround times. Mevasis recommends running a scaling study on representative geometry before finalizing hardware sizing.

Can commercial aerospace licenses (ANSYS, MSC Nastran) run on an HPC cluster? Yes, with the correct license model. Fluent and Nastran both support HPC token packs and parallel execution licenses. License token consumption scales with core count, so license optimization — choosing the right solver precision, mesh coarsening strategies, and core count per job — is often as valuable as the hardware itself. Mevasis provides license strategy consulting as part of cluster deployment.

Is on-premise infrastructure mandatory for defense-aerospace work? For programs involving ITAR-controlled technical data — which includes most military aircraft, missile, and satellite work — using commercial cloud infrastructure is not legally permissible under US export regulations. On-premise clusters within your secure facility are the correct solution. Mevasis designs and deploys classified and controlled-access HPC environments.

What storage performance does aerospace simulation require? Checkpoint/restart files for large LES runs can reach 1–5 TB per write cycle. Post-processing of full-aircraft time-averaged flow fields generates datasets in the multi-terabyte range. A parallel file system (Lustre or BeeGFS) with sustained aggregate write bandwidth of 20–50 GB/s is recommended for clusters above 128 compute nodes. Inadequate storage is one of the most common causes of suboptimal cluster utilization in aerospace environments.