Case Study
Icarus Optimizes StarCCM+ Simulation Workflows with Automation and Governance
Solutions
Industries
About Icarus
Icarus was founded in 2023 by Henry Kwan, starting from a barn in upstate New York. After building autonomous drones at NASA and designing spacecraft for in-space manufacturing, he recognized a fundamental limitation: space infrastructure is constrained by orbital mechanics. To address this, he went back to first principles and reimagined a new kind of platform, a solar-powered aircraft capable of flying for months at the edge of space. In 2024, that vision became APOLLO, Icarus’ first fully solar-powered, autonomous aircraft. Today, Icarus is scaling its team, technology, and mission. earn more at: https://www.icarus.one/.
Challenge
Icarus's Key Business Objectives
Icarus operates in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment and required a secure and scalable AWS infrastructure to support automated StarCCM+ CFD simulations across multiple environments. Their key goals included:
Key Amazon Web Services Used
- AWS Control Tower
- AWS Organizations
- AWS IAM Identity Center
- Amazon S3
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- AWS Systems Manager
Third-Party Tools
- StarCCM+
- GitHub Actions
Solution
How Cloudelligent Accelerated Icarus’s Objectives
Cloudelligent designed and implemented a secure, automated, and license-aware simulation pipeline. We transitioned Icarus from manual, unstructured workflows to a highly efficient, event-driven architecture on AWS.
1
Governance and Multi-Account Foundation
Our team established a secure multi-account environment using AWS Control Tower to implement standardized governance and security guardrails. We structured the environment with dedicated Security and Workload Organizational Units (AWS Organizations), ensuring strict boundary isolation. To manage access, we deployed AWS IAM Identity Center, providing centralized Single Sign-On (SSO) and streamlined access control across the entire Icarus landscape.
2
Automated Simulation Workflow
We built an event-driven pipeline that replaces manual job handling with seamless orchestration. When a user uploads a simulation file to Amazon S3, AWS Lambda automatically triggers the workflow, creating a structured job environment. Metadata is pushed to Amazon SQS for FIFO sequencing, ensuring simulations are processed in order. The pipeline utilizes AWS Systems Manager for cross-account license validation, ensuring StarCCM+ usage remains within compliance before dynamically launching the appropriate Amazon EC2 compute instances.
3
Dynamic Compute and Performance Optimization
To resolve simulation bottlenecks, our team implemented intelligent instance-sizing logic. By matching compute resources directly to the specific requirements of the simulation file (identified via filename suffix), we significantly reduced runtimes caused by under-provisioned compute. Upon simulation completion, results are automatically uploaded to Amazon S3, while Amazon SNS triggers real-time notifications to the team before the EC2 instance self-terminates. This helped ensure high-performance compute is only active when needed.
4
Streamlined Deployment and Storage Lifecycle Management
To support continuous innovation, we implemented GitHub Actions to automate AWS Lambda deployments, allowing for rapid, repeatable updates to the orchestration logic. We further optimized Icarus’s operational costs by implementing S3 lifecycle policies, which automatically transition input and output data to Infrequent Access storage after 60 days and purge obsolete logs after 90 days, maintaining a clean and cost-efficient environment.
Results & Benefits
Automated, Secure, and Optimized CFD Simulation Processing
Cloudelligent’s solution gave Icarus full control and visibility over their CFD workloads, consolidating simulation orchestration, compute, and license management into a single, actionable system. Key outcomes include
Secure Multi-Account AWS Foundation with Centralized Governance
Our team implemented centralized identity and account management across all AWS accounts, giving the customer full control over multi-account access. By designing and enforcing consistent policies, we helped Icarus reduce security risks and ensured reliable governance for every simulation workload.
Fully Automated, License-Aware Simulation Orchestration
We also helped Icarus automate simulation execution while integrating license-awareness into the workflow. This prevented license contention, ensured reliable throughput, and eliminated the need for manual coordination, reducing errors and delays.
Reduced Simulation Delays and Cost Optimization
The team optimized compute resources by implementing dynamic instance sizing and ephemeral EC2 usage, allowing simulations to scale efficiently with workload demands. We also introduced storage lifecycle management, improving performance while reducing runtime and cloud costs.
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Why Cloudelligent?
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