DefenseNews.com: Boeing Says Supercomputing Time Grant Will Benefit Defense Work

A U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) grant of supercomputing time to Boeing’s civilian aircraft unit should produce benefits that “absolutely spill over” with a “direct application on defense” work, a company executive said.

The grant is part of a total of 95 million hours of computing time awarded for various projects on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers by the DoE as part of its 2007 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. Raymond Orbach, DoE’s undersecretary for science, presented the awards at a news conference in Washington.

“One of the most important aspects of the INCITE program is that the resulting knowledge will largely be available, so that the information and technologies can be used by other researchers, further broadening the impact of this work,” Orbach said. “Our scientific leadership underpins nearly every aspect of our economy, and by making these resources available to a broad range of science and engineering disciplines, we believe the resulting work will make us more competitive in the years and decades to come.”

Michael Garrett, Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ director of airplane performance, said the firm’s win of 200,000 processor hours at a Cray X1E supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn., will be used for the “development, correlations and validations of large-scale computational tools for flight vehicles,” and will involve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to study the effects of various payloads on aircraft wings.

These results not only cut production time and wind-tunnel testing—Garrett noted that similar simulation advances led to Boeing building and testing 11 different wing designs for its new 787 Dreamliner versus 77 for the older 767 aircraft—but also mean lower costs for aircraft production. All of these can be applied to fighter jet production, he said.

Another experiment to be performed with the supercomputing time will test how jet engines react when a fan blade is lost. Not only does the engine have to “internalize” the blade, but it also has to remain attached to the strut and wing to which it’s connected. Such testing can reduce the chance of an outside supplier’s engine being “failed” in testing, with a potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to the engine maker and a project delay for Boeing.

The three-year-old INCITE program has expanded from 5 million hours of supercomputer time to 95 million this year, which are allocated by two peer-review panels. For 2007, 185 million hours were requested.

“Processor-hours refer to how time is allocated on a supercomputer,” a DoE statement said. “A project receiving 1 million hours could run on 2,000 processors for 500 hours, or about 21 days. Running a 1-million-hour project on a single-processor desktop computer would take more than 114 years.”

The INCITE program also awarded jet engine-maker Pratt & Whitney 750,000 hours of time on an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory. That project will “perform CFD simulations of gas-turbine engines to understand the impact of properly resolving turbulence scales on combustor swirler aerodynamics and to study its impact on the combusting simulation,” according to a description released by the DoE.

“The calculation will be extended to the full annulus to investigate asymmetric fueling effects on operability.”

The INCITE program is co-sponsored by a private group, the Council on Competitiveness, which bills itself as “the only nongovernmental group of corporate CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders committed to driving U.S. competitiveness through the creation of high-value economic activities.”