Story ID: 392
GE Aerospace and ORNL Expand Supercomputing Partnership
By: Peter Shaw-Smith
Caption: Oak Ridge National Lab helps GE with engine simulations
Word Count: 265
GE Aerospace and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are collaborating to bring more supercomputing capabilities to aerospace models and simulations.
The partners announced a cooperative research and development agreement Sunday on the eve of the Farnborough Airshow. According to GE, the joint effort will improve the company's ability to design next-gen engine technologies like Open Fan.
ORNL will help GE Aerospace better manage large simulations and more efficiently extract information. By employing artificial intelligence, researchers can more quickly understand the results of supercomputer simulations, and streamline visualization work.
"Supercomputing and access to Frontier is changing the way we design engines, allowing us to solve previously impossible problems," said Mohamed Ali, senior v-p of engineering at GE Aerospace. "We're now able to digitally fly components of an Open Fan at full-scale in a simulated environment before the hardware is built,"
ORNL is home to Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer. It can crunch data at more than a quintillion calculations per second.
"We have some of the world's most accomplished computer and computational scientists, " said Gina Tourassi, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences at ORNL. 
To model the performance of a full-scale Open Fan engine design, GE Aerospace created computational fluid dynamics software capable of running on Frontier.
Since its initial simulations on Frontier in 2023, GE Aerospace has run improved designs on the supercomputer to analyze different engine operating conditions and to better understand aerodynamic characteristics and acoustic designs.