GE Aviation business accelerates growth with AWS
Avio Aero, a subsidiary of GE’s Aviation business and the GE group’s companywide center for excellence for mechanical transmissions and low-pressure turbines, needed to expand its capacity to 800 cores in order to manage customer demand.
The company used its TRAF application to run computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, allowing it to develop the latest generation of turbines. However, the resource-intensive application took up 100 per cent of Avio Aero’s 256 Intel cores for two to three months, for just a single customer.
Accomplishing the expansion to 800 cores in its data centre would have cost over €100,000 for capacity that the company didn’t need year-round. What was required was a solution that could be scaled up or down as required.
After comparing cloud providers, Avio Aero identified Amazon Web Services (AWS) as being, in Global Digital Operations Leader Ivano Di Conca’s words, “the market leader for cloud HPC solutions”.
After migrating, Avio Aero’s HPC solution on AWS spins up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances to meet the need when TRAF demand exceeds on-premises capacity. The second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors used by EC2 C5 Instances are ideal for HPC workloads and Avio Aero deploys these nodes in placement groups, to reduce latency and optimise performance.
AWS also enables Avio Aero to avoid the issue of hardware lock-in that is often endemic with on-premise deployments. Di Conca says that one of they key upsides of the company’s AWS HPC solution, is constant access to the latest Intel processors.
The company’s harnessing of EC2’s flexible scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing structure has enabled it to achieve faster results and at lower costs. Di Conca says: "we can accelerate problem resolution by a factor of three without spending anywhere close to what this capacity would cost on premises.”
Avio Aero’s cloud solution has also transformed its customer service, as it can immediately satisfy requirements and continue growth, with capacity no longer an issue.
