The aviation and shipping industries spend billions of dollars every year on fuel and account for 5 percent of total global carbon emissions. With fuel costs and global warming concerns on the rise, more energy-efficient aircraft are in demand. Researchers and faculty at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) are taking on this challenge, using a high-productivity computing (HPC) system from SiCortex to design more aerodynamic and efficient air vehicles. To achieve this, researchers are employing concepts like non-planar wing design and other surface configurations to positively impact aerodynamics, structural design, weight and performance.

The RMC’s mission goes beyond the important goal of improving fuel efficiency. By implementing a more energy-efficient, cross-functional design process, they are designing air vehicles that contribute to improved air transportation networks and reduced air traffic congestion. More broadly, the RMC is working in partnership with the National Defence and Canadian Forces to conduct highly-complex, advanced research to develop aircraft that better sustain damage during lengthy combat missions.

The RMC selected the efficient, open source design of the SiCortex system to provide RMC researchers with a powerful, integrated parallel programming development system to be deployed on premise, without a data center.

“As a focused institution, we don’t have the resources to support a massive computing infrastructure, so it was critical to find a system that met our space and energy-efficiency requirements without sacrificing performance,” said Dr. Ruben Perez, assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at RMC. “The SiCortex system puts the power of HPC technology right in our lab at a fraction of the ownership costs of other systems. By using the SiCortex machine, we can develop applications and complete calculations overnight that may have once taken two weeks, radically reducing the time we need to advance our research.”

RMC’s multidisciplinary research team is using the SiCortex system to develop design algorithms using the Python programming language and will ultimately integrate other codes and languages into the system that support projects in the School’s aeronautical and mechanical engineering programs.

“The RMC is engaged in important and challenging research that will improve the fuel efficiency of aircraft, so it’s only appropriate that they chose SiCortex, maker of the world’s most energy efficient computers,” said Chris Stone, president and CEO of SiCortex. “The RMC is yet another proof point that energy efficiency need not compromise computational performance.”