(ORNL: Oak Ridge, TN; GE Aerospace: Le Bourget, France) -- To support the development of a revolutionary new open-fan engine architecture for the future of flight, GE Aerospace has run simulations using the world’s fastest supercomputer, which can crunch data in excess of exascale speed, or more than a quintillion calculations per second.

GE Aerospace is the first business to use Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer. It can process billions upon billions of operations per second; GE is using it to study performance of open-fan engine architecture for next-generation commercial aircraft engines. These models, developed in partnership with ORNL, could help reduce CO₂ emissions by more than 20%.

To model engine performance and noise levels, GE Aerospace created software capable of operating on Frontier with the processing power of about 37,000 GPUs. For comparison, Frontier’s processing speed is so powerful that it would take every person on Earth combined more than four years to do what the supercomputer can do in one second.

By coupling its computational fluid-dynamics software with Frontier, GE Aerospace was able to simulate air movement of a full-scale, open-fan design with incredible detail.

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