Supersonic Simulations in the Cloud: Spike Aerospace Migrates All CFD to the Cloud Using Rescale

Background and Challenge
Spike Aerospace is a fast-growing engineering firm developing the world’s first supersonic business jet with Quiet Supersonic Flight technology.  We run hundreds of complex CFD simulations to understand the aerodynamic performance of our aircraft. CFD simulations are computationally intensive and traditionally require significant investment in on-premise infrastructure, tens of thousands of hours of runtime, expensive software license fees, and a team of hardware experts to optimize the HPC.  The fixed capital costs for such compute- and time-intensive simulations would have been prohibitive under the traditional paradigm.  To quickly get up to speed without investing in significant infrastructure, we partnered with Rescale and migrated 100% of our CFD process to the cloud.  We have realized massive cost and time savings as a result.  

The Rescale Solution
Spike Aerospace is a lean, agile, and innovative organization.  Rescale’s platform was closely aligned with our needs and gave us a cost-effective, turn-key, and secure way to meet our demanding HPC needs.
On the Rescale platform, we used the natively-integrated STAR-CCM+ software and Rescale’s Nickel hardware configuration on 64 cores to analyze the aerodynamics of Spike’s CD1 aircraft for various angles of attacks at cruising altitude conditions.  Our model had 32 million cells with a domain size of 1,000 million.  The entire simulation process was conducted on Rescale’s cloud, including CAD preparation and CFD domain creation, surface and volume grid preparation, setup and execution of HPC simulations, and post-processing.


Results and Benefits
Rescale was the perfect solution for our HPC needs.  Specifically, it enabled us to:

• Reduce capital expenditure on fixed infrastructure costs and expensive software licenses.  With Rescale’s pay-as-you-go scheme for server hardware and software licenses, we paid only for what we used.
• Accelerate our product time to market with instant, scalable access to HPC resources.  Rescale’s turn-key cloud solution enabled us to get up and running in weeks rather than months.  Additionally, jobs never waited in queues or schedulers for HPC resources, and job runtimes dropped dramatically on Rescale’s scalable hardware.
• Collaborate in real-time with team members around the world.  Rescale’s cloud-based platform allowed our team to view and share all simulation files and results in real-time.

In addition, we trusted that our data was secure with Rescale, which complies with the strictest industry standards for security.  Measures such as end-to-end data encryption and tight administrative controls ensured the highest level of job security.  Rescale also provided excellent product support at every step of the process.  Their engineers worked closely with Spike’s engineers to set up our CFD simulations on the cloud, and the support team was very prompt in answering our queries and resolving all our issues.

Spike Aerospace
Spike Aerospace is leading a global collaboration to develop the world’s first supersonic business jet, the Spike S-512 Supersonic Jet.  This advanced next-generation aircraft, with Quiet Supersonic Flight technology, will save travelers up to 50% flight time.  A world-class team of senior engineers with backgrounds from leading aerospace companies are developing the high-level conceptual design of the supersonic aircraft.  Top aerospace firms, like Maya, Siemens, Aernnova and Quartus Engineering are providing their expertise in aircraft design, engineering, manufacturing and testing. Flying Faster, Do More. https://www.spikeaerospace.com/

Rescale
Rescale is the world’s leading cloud platform provider of simulation software and high performance computing (HPC) solutions.  Rescale’s platform solutions are deployed securely and seamlessly to enterprises via a web-based application environment powered by preeminent simulation software providers and backed by the largest commercially available HPC infrastructure.  Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Rescale’s customers include global Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, automotive, life sciences, marine, consumer products, and energy sectors.  For more information on Rescale products and services, visit www.rescale.com.