Tripled simulation capacity for Airbus engineers
Tripled simulation capacity for Airbus engineers
Faster execution of aerodynamic and structural simulations
Energy‑efficient operations with waste‑heat recovery
Bull delivered a modular HPC‑as‑a‑service infrastructure for Airbus, enabling large‑scale simulations for aircraft design, safety and performance while ensuring energy efficiency and long‑term scalability.
Airbus is Europe’s largest aerospace company, providing products, services and solutions for commercial aircraft, helicopters, defence and space sectors, and driving innovation in next-generation, fuel-efficient aviation.
Bull was chosen by Airbus for scalable, energy efficient HPC infrastructure, faster simulations accelerating existing aircraft innovation, digital twins and next generation aviation programmes.
Bull HPC is tasked to help Airbus in its activities that require immense computing power for aerodynamics, acoustics, structural analysis and advanced digital simulation methods such as digital twins and AI. Rapidly growing demand exceeded the capacity of the existing HPC environment, creating the need for a scalable, flexible and future-ready solution.
Bull designed and delivered a fully turnkey HPC-as-a-service solution comprising modular data centres, BullSequana XH3000 supercomputers, software and cloud connectivity, deployed across Toulouse and Hamburg. The data centres at both sites are equipped with uninterruptible power supplies and emergency generators to ensure maximum availability and act as mutual backup systems. The supercomputing infrastructure includes more than 860 compute nodes in Toulouse and over 570 in Hamburg, with each node featuring two AMD 64-core processors interconnected via InfiniBand.
The modular data centres were pre-integrated at Bull’s manufacturing facilities and assembled on site, significantly reducing deployment time while maintaining high availability. Bull’s patented Direct Liquid Cooling technology maximises energy efficiency. The infrastructure is further supported by Bull’s industrial HPC experts, who assist with application optimisation and the deployment of advanced simulation environments.
The new HPC environment triples Airbus’ available simulation capacity and supports large-scale, parallel engineering workflows. Engineers benefit from higher system availability, faster simulation cycles and the ability to scale resources on demand, creating a robust foundation for future technologies and accelerating aircraft innovation.
