In this paper, an automation process to perform Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis is developed to carry out aerodynamic design and optimization. The aircraft model/geometry is defined by a Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema (CPACS) file, and the analyses are facilitated using high performance computers (HPC). As the computational capability of the available HPC systems is a limiting factor in the complexity of analyses that can be performed, a detailed performance analysis of the open source CFD code SU2 is undertaken and the profiling and performance analyses for large simulations are carried out.