Can Do Everything Including Force-On-Force Scenarios, Long Before Battle

Long before new military aircraft are built, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation is saving time and taxpayers' money by virtually proving digital prototypes inside computer- generated wind tunnels and battle scenarios. To test how a new aircraft will perform, Sikorsky relies on server and storage solutions from Silicon Graphics.

A longtime SGI customer, Sikorsky recently deployed the SGI solutions at its Bridgeport, CT, facility to support computer-aided engineering design and analyses of current and future aircraft. The project includes such vertical take-off and landing vehicles as the US Navy's Heavy Lift Replacement helicopter, the US Army's UH- 60M BLACK HAWK helicopter, the new Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR-X) for the US Air Force, and aircraft for Canada's Maritime Helicopter Program, and the new high speed X2 Technology(TM) demonstrator.

Shipped in June, Sikorsky engineers are armed with a high-density SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 system powered by 128 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 512GB of memory, an SGI Altix 350 system with 32 processors and 64GB of memory, and a 9TB SGI InfiniteStorage solution, which enables them to subject digital models of new aircraft rotors or wings -- or even entire helicopters -- to the type of forces they would encounter in flight. To do so, they quickly access large data sets from the InfiniteStorage array and run complex 2D and 3D electromagnetic calculations, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) studies with the Altix system.

"Altix allows us to run operational analyses, including force-on-force scenarios that the vehicle might experience in a supply mission, a troop rescue effort, or a battle situation," said Joseph Pantalone, Sikorsky technical fellow and chief of Survivability and Low Observable Technology. "With Altix, we can design, analyze, and model specific components and subsystems, as well as the aircraft as a whole supporting numerous air vehicle and system integration attributes."

"Highly detailed analysis of a helicopter rotor, propulsion, and electromagnetic systems, reveal how the aircraft performs. We can look at the systems individually to get comprehensive analytical data of their components," said Pantalone. "Or we can look at how a specific component performs as part of the overall aircraft system as it is executing required flight maneuvers."

National security policies mandate that computing projects must be conducted separately, so that no project mingles with another. In the past, this meant that servers could run only one job at a time. But SGI Altix allows Sikorsky engineers to separate the system's CPUs and memory into different partitions, effectively providing an entirely distinct platform for each job. This allows engineers to have projects from multiple clients securely running simultaneously -- and still separately -- on a single Altix system.

FMI: www.sgi.com