Avio Aero Accelerates Business Growth with HPC Solution on AWS

Avio Aero is a GE Aviation business and the GE group’s companywide center of excellence for mechanical transmissions and low-pressure turbines. It has more than a century’s experience in overcoming technological challenges through continuous investment in research and development, strong relationships with leading universities and international research centers, and collaborative partnerships with key operators in the global aviation industry. During a recent period of strong growth, Avio Aero found that its on-premises high-performance computing (HPC) solution delayed response to customer requests.

Avio Aero uses an application called TRAF to run the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations needed to develop the latest generation of aircraft turbines. Developed in collaboration with the University of Florence, the application is resource-intensive: a TRAF job for any single customer monopolized 100 percent of the company's 256 Intel cores for two to three months at a time.

"To eliminate this bottleneck and better manage the peaks requested, we needed to expand capacity to 800 cores," says Ivano Di Conca, global digital operations leader for Avio Aero. "But accomplishing this expansion in our data center would have cost $110,000 (€100,000) for capacity we don’t need year-round. We wanted a solution that could scale up and down as needed."

Avio Aero compared cloud providers and identified Amazon Web Services (AWS) as what Di Conca calls "the market leader for cloud HPC solutions." Now, when TRAF demands exceed the company's on-premises capacity, the HPC solution Avio Aero built on AWS spins up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances to meet the need. Amazon EC2 C5 instances use second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors well suited for HPC workloads. Avio Aero deploys these AWS computing nodes in placement groups to reduce network latency and improve performance.

By running on AWS, the company avoids the problem of hardware lock-in inherent to on-premises deployments. "For TRAF workloads, we are always looking for more speed and higher performance," says Di Conca. "One of the most important benefits of our AWS HPC solution is that we always have access to the latest Intel processors."

Flexible scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing enable faster results at lower costs. "TRAF scales linearly to about 800 cores, so—on AWS—when we need to reduce the elapsed time, we can accelerate problem resolution by a factor of three without spending anywhere close to what this capacity would cost on premises," says Di Conca.

The cloud HPC solution has transformed Avio Aero’s relationship to its customers. "By using an HPC solution on AWS, we're no longer forced to leave customers waiting for results because of limited on-premises resources," says Di Conca. "On AWS, we can immediately satisfy customer requests and continue our growth without worrying about capacity."

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/hpc.