HPC 2017-18 | High-performance computing
from scratch on GPUs. It is empowered by the thousands of cores available in a GPU and it provides real-time simulation results that are primarily aimed at designers,’ said Slagter. ‘Tis was a multi-year development programme where people have drag and drop capabilities, but with a built-in simulation that solves in an instant, so people do not have to wait to get their results. For example, if a user changes the CAD, you can immediately see the influence on the flow or stresses of the structure.’ While this tool will not directly be used on
HPC resources, it does feed into the same design cycle and could reduce the amount of simulation required, as small changes can be made early in the design process without requiring large simulations to verify their performance. ‘It is not providing the full high-fidelity results
lower barrier to entry than traditional HPC. ‘Tese partners work with system integrators
to remotely manage HPC clusters for our customers, and those clusters are shipped to the customers but then everything is up and running, Ansys is pre-installed and the system is optimised to run Ansys workloads,’ said Slagter. ‘Gradually HPC resources are becoming more
readily available to all engineers and hardware is becoming more affordable and also more powerful than ever before,’ Slagter concluded.
Preparing for the future Tough the largest growth in the use of HPC comes from small and medium-sized companies, CAE soſtware providers like Ansys are still putting a lot of time and effort into tuning their soſtware for large-scale HPC simulations. Ansys has developed partnerships with HPC
centres such as HLRS in Stuttgart and King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Tese partnerships allow Ansys to scale its soſtware to test the limits of engineering simulation on some of the largest supercomputers in the world. For example, in July this year Ansys, Saudi
Aramco and KAUST announced that they had set a new supercomputing milestone by scaling Ansys Fluent to nearly 200,000 processor cores. Tis supercomputing record represents a more than five-fold increase over the record set just three years ago when Fluent first reached the 36,000-core scaling milestone. Te calculations were run on the Shaheen II, a
Cray XC40 supercomputer, hosted at the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab (KSL). ‘We need to deliver better HPC performance
and capability. Tese customers are pushing the envelope; they come up with ever more
challenging models that require more computational resources and better performance’ said Slagter. ‘We are constantly working on the optimisation of our soſtware. We need to provide more parallelism throughout the entire process. We need to continue working with supercomputing partners.’ By partnering with these HPC centres,
Ansys can test the limits of its soſtware and implement optimisations to take advantage of the highly parallel nature of today’s leadership class HPC systems. Without these partnerships the onus would be on Ansys alone to deliver these improvements, which are quickly becoming a task too complex for a single organisation. ‘Te computer industry has delivered
enormous increases in computing speed at lower cost. As an ISV, we have also made significant improvements regarding parallel performance, robustness, and scalability’ said Slagter. ‘Te same is true for GPUs as well. Any of our Ansys products, from structural mechanics to fluid dynamics to electromagnetics, are now taking advantage of GPUs,’ concluded Slagter.
Expanding the capabilities of design engineers Another fast-growing area of CAE is the use of simulation tools by designers that can make quick changes to design concepts and see the changes in product performance without having to wait for verification from engineers. Slagter explained that Ansys has been working for a number of years on its design tool, Ansys Discovery Live. Te aim of this product is to give simulation tools to designers who to accelerate prototyping of new products. ‘We have recently launched Ansys Discovery Live a new product that is completely built
that the analysts require, but that is not necessary for designers who want very quick results,’ said Slagter. Tis new tool can feed into HPC workflows,
as designers may work quickly on a workstation and then pass data to engineering teams that can run a full analytical simulation on a HPC
HPC is helping manufacturers both cut costs and create new revenue streams, because they can design completely new products they had not previously considered
cluster. Ultimately, modern CAE requires ISVs to serve several user communities with different requirements from the large aerospace or automotive companies, to small engineering firms and design teams that have different uses for engineering soſtware. ‘It may sound difficult if you looking for a
single solution to meet the requirements of these different types of customers but that is not what you should do, or at least that is not our HPC strategy,’ said Slagter. ‘We are not working on a single solution that will meet all requirements, because that is impossible. For analysts, we will continue to improve parallelisation further, optimise soſtware, extend the parallelism throughout the workflow, work with supercomputer centres to profile and benchmark the soſtware at an extreme scale. ‘It is impossible to provide just a single
solution, you need an ecosystem. It is becoming more and more important to grow and come up with the right solutions by working with the right partners,’ he concluded. l
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