The Benefits of combining ANSYS Simulation with HPC and Cloud Computing Simulation has become even more prevalent in the world of engineering than it was even 5 years ago. Commercial tools have gotten significantly easier to use, whether you are looking at tools embedded within CAD programs or the standalone flagship analysis tools. The driving force behind these changes are to ultimately let engineers and companies understand their design quicker and with more fidelity than before. Engineering simulation is one of those cliché items where everyone says “We want more!” Engineers want to analyze bigger and more complex problems, as well as do large scale design of experiments with hundreds of design variations; all of that and they want these results instantaneously. They want to be able to quickly understand their designs along with common design trends, in order be able to make changes accordingly and get their products optimized and to market quicker. ANSYS, Inc. spends a significant amount of R&D in helping customers achieve just that, and a large component of that development is High Performance Computing, or HPC. This technology allows engineers to solve their structural, fluid and/or electromagnetic analyses across multiple processors, and even across multiple computing machines. Engineers can leverage HPC on laptops, workstations, clusters and even full data centers. PADT is fortunate to be working with Nimbix, a High Performance Computing Platform that allowed us to quickly and easily iterate through different models with various cores specified. It was seamless, easy to use, and FAST! In order to get a better understanding of how Nimbix’s HPC platform helps to improve solve speed and efficiency, let’s take a look at four problems: a large tractor axle model, exhaust CFD model, rubber seal FEA, and a quadrocopter CFD model. These problems cover a nice spectrum of analysis size and complexity. 1
Transcript
The Benefits of combining ANSYS Simulation with HPC and Cloud Computing
Simulation has become even more prevalent in the world of engineering than it was even 5 years ago. Commercial tools have gotten significantly easier to use, whether you are looking at tools embedded within CAD programs or the standalone flagship analysis tools. The driving force behind these changes are to ultimately let engineers and companies understand their design quicker and with more fidelity than before.
Engineering simulation is one of those cliché items where everyone says “We want more!” Engineers want to analyze bigger and more complex problems, as well as do large scale design of experiments with hundreds of design variations; all of that and they want these results instantaneously. They want to be able to quickly understand their designs along with common design trends, in order be able to make changes accordingly and get their products optimized and to market quicker.
ANSYS, Inc. spends a significant amount of R&D in helping customers achieve just that, and a large component of that development is High Performance Computing, or HPC. This technology allows engineers to solve their structural, fluid and/or electromagnetic analyses across multiple processors, and even across multiple computing machines. Engineers can leverage HPC on laptops, workstations, clusters and even full data centers.
PADT is fortunate to be working with Nimbix, a High Performance Computing Platform that allowed us to quickly and easily iterate through different models with various cores specified. It was seamless, easy to use, and FAST!
In order to get a better understanding of how Nimbix’s HPC platform helps to improve solve speed and efficiency, let’s take a look at four problems: a large tractor axle model, exhaust CFD model, rubber seal FEA, and a quadrocopter CFD model. These problems cover a nice spectrum of analysis size and complexity.
1
Summary•58 Parts
•51 x Bolts with Pretension
•Gaskets
•928K Elements, 1.6M Nodes
2
This model has several parts all with contact defined and has 51 bolts that have pretension defined. A very large but not overly complex FEA problem. As you can see from the results, even by utilizing 8 cores you can triple your analysis throughput for a work day. This leads to more designs being analyzed and validated which gives engineers the results they need quicker.
Cores Elapsed Time [s] Estimated Models Per 8 [Hours]
2 14,525 24 9,710 38 5,233 6
16 4,009 7
Tractor Axle FEA
The exhaust model is a huge model with 33 million elements with several complicated flow passages and turbulence. This is a model that would take over a week to run using 1 core but with HPC on a decent workstation you can get that down to 1 day. Leveraging more HPC hardware resources such as a cluster or using a cloud computing platform like Nimbix will see that drop to 3 hours. Imagine getting results that used to take over 1 week that now will only take a few hours. You’ll notice that this model scaled linearly up to 128 cores. In many CFD simulations the more hardware resources and HPC technology you throw at it, the faster it will run.
The rubber seal is actually a relatively small size problem, but quite complex. Not only does it need full hyper-elastic material properties defined with large strain effects included, it also includes a leakage test. This will pressurize any exposed areas of the seal. This will of course cause some deformation which will lead to more leaked surfaces and so on. It basically because a pressure advancing solution.
From the results, again you can see the number of models that can be analyzed in the same time frame is significantly more. This model was already under an hour, even with the large nonlinearity, and with HPC it was down to less than half an hour.
Lorem ipsum
Cores Elapsed Time [s] Estimated Models Per 8 [Hours]
As seen from the results leveraging HPC technology such as Nimbix can be hugely advantageous. Many simulation tools out there do not fully leverage solving on multiple computing machines or even multiple cores. ANSYS does and the value is easily a given. HPC makes large complex simulation more practical as a part of the design process timeline. It allows for greater throughput of design investigations leading to better fidelity and more information to the engineer to develop an optimized part quicker.
3,353 sdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasd
The drone model is a half symmetry model that includes 2 rotating domains to account for the propellers. This was ran as a steady state simulation using ANSYS Fluent. Simply utilizing 8 cores will let you solve 3 designs versus 1.
Quadrocopter Drone CFD
Summary•Multiple Rotating Domains
•2M Elements, 1.4 M Nodes
Cores Elapsed Time [Hours] Speedup
2 2.1 1.04 1.2 1.86 0.8 2.68 0.7 3.0
5
Interested in learning more about how ANSYS leverages HPC or Nimbix, the cloud computing platofrm that PADT leverages?
PADT HEADQUARTERSat the ASU Research Park7755 S. Research Dr. Suite 110Tempe, AZ 85284
Phoenix Analysis & Design TechnologiesWe Make Innovation Work
Faster. Better. More Economical.
Nimbix is about how simple we make it to solve problems that were once impossible to imagine. We strip away the hurdles between your data and its potential.
FasterRun jobs faster. Crunch more numbers. Test smarter. Nimbix gets the job done quicker. JARVICE makes the process more efficient. And the streamlined, user-friendly API means your team can do more in less time.
BetterNimbix is a cloud platform for pure High Performance Computing. That means our supercomputers are super smart at running applications and processing your data. Perhaps more important, Nimbix gives you access to explore the full potential in your data.
EconomicalFor most workloads, Nimbix is far less expensive than building, running and maintaining your own supercomputer. It’s also more efficient at spinning up, executing, completing the job and delivering your results — which saves you time and money. And our user-friendly platform means you invest less in development and infrastructure.
