Scaling HPC in 6 Months for Aerospace Modeling Using AWS with Hypersonix Launch Systems

Founded in 2019, Hypersonix is an Australian company that aims to push the boundaries of sustainable hypersonic flight. To achieve this, the company is building a hydrogen-powered scramjet, a special type of engine that combusts fuel while the airflow through the engine moves faster than the speed of sound. Hypersonic aircraft will make it possible for airlines, freighters, and militaries to transport people and equipment at speeds above Mach 5 (greater than 1.5 km/sec). At this speed, continents can be crossed in tens of minutes.

What distinguishes Hypersonix’s vehicles is that they are built with reusable parts and use hydrogen as fuel, which means that they don’t create pollution during flight. “The aerospace industry creates a lot of pollution,” says Dr. Michael Smart, cofounder, chief technology officer, and head of engineering at Hypersonix. “Being green is important to our company.”

Building and testing these innovative aircraft requires HPC to create in-depth models and perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. “Hypersonic flight is difficult and costly to experiment with,” says Dr. Stephen Hall, head of advanced CFD thermal structural simulation at Hypersonix. “We rely on this computing and advanced simulation approach to aid our design and improve our vehicle.” For its simulations, Hypersonix uses Simcenter STAR-CCM+, CFD software developed by Siemens Digital Industries Software, an AWS Partner. Thus, Hypersonix benefits from thousands of latest-generation CPUs, many terabytes of memory, and fast networking.

The HPC needs of Hypersonix—particularly for high fidelity and speed—quickly outgrew the company’s on-premises 64-core workstation. The company knew that scaling on premises would be expensive and time-consuming. So by 2022, Hypersonix decided to migrate to AWS to securely and cost-effectively meet its needs. “Simcenter STAR-CCM+ has the flexibility to efficiently use all the different computing resources that AWS offers,” says Dr. Hall. “The two make a very good combination and empower a world-class simulation capability.”

Hypersonix migrated to AWS over 6 months, beginning in 2022. The Hypersonix team had never used AWS, but with close support from the AWS team, it soon overcame the learning curve to get its simulation processes set up and working efficiently.

To run its CFD workloads, Hypersonix used AWS Graviton3E-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc7g Instances, which are powered by custom-designed AWS Graviton server processors developed by AWS. They use the most modern ARM chips and energy efficient green computing to empower excellent price performance for Star-CCM+ simulation HPC workloads on AWS. The company runs these instances through AWS ParallelCluster, an open-source cluster management tool that makes it simple to deploy and manage HPC clusters on AWS. After migration, the company saw its computational speed increase significantly. Hypersonix completed 1,600 simulations, each involving more than 70 million cells, in 1 week—a task that would have taken up to 3 months on its previously used on-premises workstations. “Part of innovation is solving issues quickly,” says Dr. Smart. “Using AWS, we manage to get answers and move fast with our simulations.”