Technical Details
European aviation giant Airbus has introduced a new distributed supercomputer infrastructure, located at two sites — Toulouse (France) and Hamburg (Germany). The IT upgrade is part of a five-year contract worth 100 million euros with provider Bull. The new system has allowed Airbus to immediately triple its computing capabilities for virtual design and testing of aircraft and helicopters.
Background and Context
The supercomputer's hardware is based on a modular architecture and BullSequana XH3000 racks. The computing nodes consist of a combination of AMD and Nvidia CPUs and GPUs, and the storage subsystem is built on IBM Spectrum Scale technology. The high-speed interconnect is provided by Nvidia's InfiniBand NDR network architecture with a bandwidth of up to 400 Gbit/s per port.
Industry Impact
The containerized data center modules were pre-assembled and tested at Bull's factory in Angers (France), then delivered to the aircraft manufacturing sites: the French site received the equipment in 2025, and the German site in spring 2026. Despite the physical separation between the two countries, both systems operate under a single task scheduler as a single virtual cluster. Airbus plans to use these capabilities to create 'digital twins' of civil aircraft and helicopters, perform complex aerodynamic calculations, analyze structural loads, and conduct acoustic tests on fuselages.