Engineers are often frustrated by the computational limitations of simulation. Complete simulation of complex projects takes too long on even high end workstations, so we simplify the simulation, simulate components separately, and otherwise reduce the computation required to simulate and analyze our designs. By simplifying the simulation, we can complete the simulation in reasonable time, but we risk missing interactions between components and issues that cannot be discovered without a full system simulation.
Increasing computational performance is a solution to this issue, but it’s difficult to increase performance enough in engineering workstations to make a significant impact. A more productive approach combines multiple high performance computing (HPC) processor cores to increase performance for simulation, but the very high cost and size of these systems effectively make it unfeasible to provide such a system for each engineer. Engineers can share these systems, but often find shared systems difficult to access, inconvenient to use and unavailable during times of critical need.
A web-based interface allows a system to be shared among many engineers, companies and users to resolve these issues. The ExaCLOUD environment provides a web interface to a very high performance simulation environment, allowing users to benefit from the performance without having to pay for the full cost of building and maintaining the system 24/7. ExaCLOUD combines tens of thousands of HPC core processors into a secure, scalable software as a service (SaaS) environment and provides user with access through a simple web interface. Engineers can easily see the system architecture as well as the hierarchical relationship between simulated components with a simple graphical display of icons. Users appreciate the simple and clearly illustrated user interface as well as the significant increase in simulation speed and performance.
The PowerFLOW Suite node integrates analysis tools and workflow to support multidisciplinary simulations and optimizations. This environment is a common integrated platform for multiple simulations and optimization environments. Users appreciate the modularity and interconnection of the supported tools that allows results from one simulation to be used as input to a different tool. This workflow combined with the HPC capability of the system enables users to perform multiple simulations simultaneously to improve accuracy and reduce the time to complete simulations.
The modeFRONTIER environment runs within PowerFLOW to streamline the design process. Users can choose the best options from third-party tools running in this environment to design their product and then perform a full simulation. Engineers can perform statistical and data analysis, data visualization, and simulation and analysis with this system.