Competitive pressures drive manufacturers to shorten time-to-market and reduce prototype costs by simulating complex product characteristics. As an engineer, analyst, or scientist responsible for these simulations, you’re often in the hot seat and on the design critical path. We understand the stakes are high for the research scientists and aeronautical and mechanical engineers who design airframes, gas turbines, missiles, and flight control simulators. These projects are major investments of time and money with budgets measured in multi-millions and billions of dollars. If you can improve the fidelity of the preliminary design process, you not only save millions, you reduce risk in cost and schedule.
To achieve better results, you rely on Mechanical Computer Aided Engineering (MCAE) tools to analyze and simulate structures, machinery, vehicles, and products that are subject to stress, temperature, pressure and/or electro-magnetic fields. You use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications to solve equations describing the flow within or around the product. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) methods are the obvious choice to solve the equations describing the stress, temperature, and/or electromagnetic fields within the product. To solve these problems in reasonable time frames, you need high performance computing if you ever want to see your family at dinner time again.
Penguin HPC Clusters hit the sweet spot for analysis of MCAE problems with the following characteristics:
- Scale. For example, a large structure with linear deformation, or non-linear deformation of a smaller structure.
- Dynamics. For example, transient phenomena, including time varying loads, impacts, and phase changes, especially when explicit solutions are required for accuracy.
- Coupling. For example, multi-physics problems, involving simultaneous solution of stress, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and/or electromagnetic phenomena.
- Computational speed is the largest constraint on performing big jobs.
- Many simulations take days or weeks to run.
- While desktop PCs continue to be adequate for static problems, more complex problems may require additional computing power.
- Older equipment may be reaching the end of its lifecycle.
- Engineers are being asked to run many more simulations which puts additional pressure on the analysts who support them.
- Technical users often function as their own system administrators.
Running your particular applications faster is key, whether you’re determining the performance of aerodynamic structures with CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations or using FEA (finite element analysis) to examine the stress and strain within a solid structure imposed by a given set of loads. Factor in multi-physics simulations and multi-disciplinary optimization and the computational costs can become prohibitive.
Typically, computational speed is the largest constraint on performing big jobs. The scope of the calculations is so vast that it is often necessary to split up a problem to tackle it effectively. Optimization applications are embarrassingly parallel and run well on clusters. However, many of your applications require significant inter-process communication so a low latency interconnect is also important to ensure scalability for large simulations. Your team needs an integrated cluster that meets these requirements and can be scaled to your particular application and budget as well as test clusters so you can validate your applications independently on our equipment.
Computational ApplicationsWe expect you’re already using or evaluating one of the stable, proven applications to simulate mechanisms and structures, solve equations of motion that govern fluid flow, simulate multi-physics simulations and optimize multi-disciplinary designs. While most applications are used across a wide variety of industries, some have modules particularly well suited for specific uses. As part of your vendor evaluation, our Penguin engineers will help you benchmark the performance of your specific applications and problems on our equipment. Our Professional Services Group can support you through installation, shakedown and on-going provisioning.
