GE uses Oak Ridge supercomputer to test new open fan architecture

LE BOURGET, France - GE Aerospace in Cincinnati has announced that the company has run simulations using the world's fastest supercomputer capable of crunching data in excess of exascale speed - or more than a quintillion calculations per second - in an effort to support the development of a new aviation open fan engine architecture. 

To model engine performance and noise levels, GE Aerospace created software capable of operating on Frontier, a recently commissioned supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory with processing power of about 37,000 GPUs. For comparison, Frontier's processing speed is so powerful, it would take every person on Earth combined more than four years to do what the supercomputer can in one second.

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

GE Aerospace and Safran Aircraft Engines unveiled in 2021 the CFM RISE program, which includes development of advanced new engine architectures such as the open fan, along with advanced thermal management, combustion, and hybrid electric capabilities. The goal of the RISE Program is to develop technologies that enable a future engine to achieve at least 20% lower fuel consumption and 20% fewer CO2 emissions compared to today's most efficient engines.

Through the RISE program, CFM International continues to mature open fan engine architecture, which removes the nacelle for greater propulsive efficiency while achieving the same speed and cabin experience commercial aviation passengers can expect from air travel today. GE Aerospace's use of supercomputing power and software tools are helping engineers understand open fan aerodynamic and acoustic physics in new ways. For example, Frontier unlocks the ability to better evaluate new engine technologies at flight scale in the design phase. As a result, GE can improve test hardware designs and better optimize engine performance and airframe integration.

Frontier is an HPE Cray EX supercomputer from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) with more than 9,400 nodes, each equipped with a 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPU and four AMD Instinct™️ 250X accelerators. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is a DOE Office of Science user facility.