Case Study: TLG Aerospace achieves 75% reduction in CFD simulation costs and 1,000+‑core scalability with Amazon Web Services

TLG Aerospace - Customer Case Study

TLG Aerospace, a Seattle–based engineering services firm that performs CFD analysis and aircraft design work using STAR‑CCM+, faced rising simulation costs and limits on compute scale. Running typical cases on their previous cloud and internal HPC cluster cost hundreds of dollars per simulation and the on‑prem cluster couldn’t allocate enough nodes or memory to tackle larger, industry‑scale problems.

TLG migrated to AWS, adopting EC2 Spot instances for compute, S3 for multi‑TB storage, EBS for head‑node volumes, and CloudWatch for remote job monitoring. Spot instances cut cost per simulation by about 75%, enabling the company to pass savings to customers and be more competitive, while CloudWatch reduced rework; TLG can now scale STAR‑CCM+ beyond 1,000 cores (running 60+ Spot instances per case) and bid on much larger projects.

TLG Aerospace

Andrew McComas

Engineering Manager