Exascale Computing for Aerospace Applications: Anna Schwarz Awarded Compute Time on Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer

April 22, 2025

As part of the highly competitive GCS Exascale Pioneer Call, Dr. Anna Schwarz, Postdoctoral Researcher in the research group of Professor Andrea Beck at the Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics (IAG), has been granted access to Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, located at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Her project is one of only three from the field of fluid dynamics across Europe to receive this prestigious allocation.

Dr. Schwarz’s research focuses on high-fidelity simulations of unsteady turbulent flows around aircraft wings — a key challenge in modern computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Utilizing exascale computing power, the project aims to capture complex flow structures and transitions with unprecedented resolution, paving the way for more accurate aerodynamic predictions and innovations in aircraft design.

Main wing wake structures at high speed conditions on the main wing of the Common Research Model (CRM) aircraft. The inset shows a detailed shock-boundary layer interaction on a wing cross section. CRM simulation used with friendly permission from Th. Lutz, Institute for Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, University of Stuttgart.

The successful project proposal contributes to the European Centre of Excellence for Exascale CFD (CEEC), of which Professor Andrea Beck is a founding member. Beck, who serves as Managing Director at IAG and leads the group Numerical Methods in Fluid Mechanics, is also a Participating Researcher at SimTech.

“This allocation is an important milestone - not just for our research group, but for the broader scientific community working on exascale-enabled simulation,” says Professor Andrea Beck. “It demonstrates how fundamental research in numerical methods and HPC can directly translate into real-world impact, particularly in the context of sustainable and efficient aerospace technologies. SimTech’s interdisciplinary environment plays a key role in driving this type of innovation forward.”

Our latest simulation of our exascale-ready GPU-accelerated CFD solver GALÆXI investigated the transonic turbulent flow around a compressor cascade of a jet engine. Taken from [Beck et al., GALÆXI: Solving complex compressible flows with high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods on accelerator-based systems, CPC, 2025].

JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) is Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, capable of over one exaflop - that is, more than one quintillion calculations per second. It offers a unique infrastructure for simulation-driven science at the very frontier of computational performance.

Further information on the GCS Exascale Pioneer Call and a list of selected projects is available on the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing website.

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