Fine-tuning aerodynamics

The aerospace industry relies on massive amounts of computing power to continually simulate, test, and optimize vehicles for reliability and accuracy.

Like many aerospace companies and organizations, Orbital Sciences depends on CFD; specifically, the company is using it to predict how rockets and satellites will perform in various environments. CFD works by turning the region of flow into discrete cubic-like cells. The governing fluid equations are then used to set up a large matrix, which can then be solved using a high-performance computer system.

In the past, Orbital had been limited by a computer system that would get bogged down, resulting in a significant slowdown for CFD problems that could involve more than one million cells.