Australian Sports Commission Accelerates High Performance Compute using AWS

After four years of development, the ASC and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra co-developed FLWYD//SSF, a proprietary CFD application purpose-built to model how athletes and their equipment move through air and water. Computational fluid dynamics is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and algorithms to simulate fluid flow, allowing coaches, performance support staff and engineers to optimize athlete positioning, equipment design, and technique with a level of precision previously reserved for aerospace and automotive industries.

To extend the platform's impact across national sporting organizations (NSOs) and national sporting institutes (NSIs), the ASC set out to deploy FLWYD//SSF as a secure, highly scalable, and cost-efficient HPC environment in the AWS cloud. HPC uses powerful processors, large memory systems, and high-speed networking to solve complex computational problems rapidly. The approach also needed to move quickly, so that the CFD software could be made accessible to engineers and developers across Australia with minimal friction.

Sensitive athlete data — including biometric information and digital performance representations — had to remain within Australian borders, which ruled out most commercial cloud-based CFD platforms headquartered overseas. ASC also needed to build deep internal cloud expertise instead of depending solely on external vendors, to establish a repeatable model for future digital innovation initiatives.

To accelerate delivery, ASC adopted the AWS Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) program. Over eight weeks, ASC and AWS collaborated to capture requirements and scope the engagement, running immersion days to build hands-on experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, high-performance computing architecture, and developer productivity tools, including Amazon Q Developer, a generative artificial intelligence-powered (AI) assistant for software development. AWS assigned a dedicated EBA lead to coordinate logistics, bringing teams from Canberra, Melbourne, and Brisbane together: cutting red tape, accelerating decision-making, and removing blockers ahead of the three-day sprint.

The structured program culminated in a three-day AWS EBA event that brought together 28 participants, across ASC and AWS, in a focused working session. Organized across three workstreams (Platform, HPC, and Application), the EBA formed cross-functional teams of data scientists, developers, infrastructure and operations engineers, and product owners. By breaking down organizational silos and learning by doing, engineers and IT leaders aligned architecture and security decisions in real time, achieving in three days what would traditionally have taken ASC up to a year through sequential approval cycles.

Drawing on learnings from the preparation phase and using Amazon Q Developer, the ASC team delivered a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliant HPC environment, 100% codified and automated. NIST provides globally recognized standards and best practices for managing cybersecurity risk, giving ASC a defensible, government-grade security posture from day one. The team built the prerequisite secure platform, integrated the HPC environment into ASC's internal authentication and authorization platform, and deployed FLWYD//SSF connected to their public website — entirely through automation and with guidance from AWS experts.

The entire solution was delivered as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), the practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes. This allows for repeatable, auditable, and version-controlled deployments, reducing future delivery risk and long-term vendor dependency.

To operate the new environment, ASC uses AWS ParallelCluster, an open-source cluster management tool that coordinates HPC workloads and manages job scheduling. Simulations run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide scalable cloud-based compute capacity to support the demands of CFD workloads. Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service for cloud resources and applications, gives the ASC real-time visibility into system performance and cost. All infrastructure was deployed within the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, ensuring all athlete data remains within Australian borders and meets government data sovereignty requirements.

The ASC now operates FLWYD//SSF as a secure, cloud-enabled capability designed for national scale with the governance controls, cost visibility, and scalability to onboard additional NSOs and NSIs as demand grows.

The EBA demonstrated a new way of working for ASC — hands-on and built around agile delivery. By bringing cross-functional teams together, the program broke down organizational silos and compressed project delivery cycles from months to days, establishing a repeatable model for future digital initiatives. ASC and AWS plan to continue running EBAs to accelerate learning and delivery across ASC's ongoing cloud journey.

The AIS Engineering team and Athletics Australia, the national governing body for athletics, has already run more than 100 simulations using FLWYD//SSF on AWS to identify optimal wheelchair and tire configurations for Paralympic track athletes, delivering faster performance insights that traditionally would take a significant amount of time through physical testing alone.

Swimming Australia, the country's peak governing body for competitive swimming, has identified digital twin modeling as its next use case, with plans to use the platform to create performance insights ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

With FLWYD//SSF now live in a fully compliant, cloud-based HPC environment, ASC has demonstrated that public sector organizations can unlock innovation potential and move locally built research into production at scale — while maintaining security, compliance, and data sovereignty. Looking ahead to the 2028 Olympic Games, ASC plans to expand access to additional national sporting organizations and continue developing FLWYD//SSF as a shared high-performance computing capability for Australia's entire elite sport ecosystem.

“The AWS EBA provided a structured way to move research into operational capability. It strengthened how we deliver digital initiatives and positioned us for continued innovation across Australian sport," said Dr. Paul Collins, Research and Innovation Officer, Australian Sports Commission.