insideHPC » Digital Manufacturing

Livermore to Share 5 Petaflops with Industry

Ralph — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:16:13 +0000

Over at FCW Magazine, Mark Rockwell writes that Lawrence Livermore National Labs has five petaflops of computing power it wants to share. To help fuel technological innovation to spur U.S. economic competitiveness, the research facility has officially opened up access to its massive Vulcan supercomputer to industry and academia for collaborative developmental projects.

High performance computing is a key to accelerating the technological innovation that underpins U.S. economic vitality and global competitiveness,” said Fred Streitz, HPC Innovation Center director, in a June 11 statement. “Vulcan offers a level of computing that is transformational, enabling the design and execution of studies that were previously impossible, opening opportunities for new scientific discoveries and breakthrough results for American industries.”

During its initial shakeout period, LLNL said Vulcan was combined with the larger Sequoia system to produce set a world speed record of 504 billion events per second for a discrete event simulation in collaboration with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That achievement, said the lab, opens the way for the scientific exploration of complex, planetary-sized systems.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Panel Discussion on Transforming Your Business with HPC

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:00:53 +0000

In this video from the OCE Discovery Conference, a panel of experts looks at how business can benefit from HPC.

What if your company could use data mining to discover new information, identify new trends and correlations, and create new knowledge? What if you could safely simulate multi-million dollar physical assets and processes to accelerate your product development while preserving resources and reducing costs? What if we could analyze the human brain to develop preventative treatments for disorders and our physical environment to avert disasters? High Performance Computing (HPC) can equip your company with these kinds of competitive advantages.

Moderators:

Ron Van Holst, Director, Research Development, High Performance Computing, Ontario Centres of Excellence
Chris Pratt, BUE Strategic Initiatives Executive, IBM Canada

Panelists:

J. Wayne Gudbranson, President & CEO, Branham Group Inc.
Dan Sinai, Associate Vice President, Research, Western University
Abe Heifets, CEO, Chematria
Dr. Jennifer Flexman, Director of Research Development and Commercialization, Sargent Laboratory, University of Toronto
Ted Mao, Vice President, Research, Trojan UV

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Hermit Supercomputer Continues its Industrial Mission at HLRS

Ralph — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:16:26 +0000

Now well into its second year of operation, the Hermit system at HLRS in Germany still holds the title as the world’s fastest supercomputer for use in industrial research.

The Cray XE6 system with its 113,664 processing cores has been fully operational and running stably from day one, delivering an average planned system uptime of 99%. With a mean usage capacity rate of 85%, the HLRS HPC system delivers proof that it was designed for sustained performance for real applications. Approximately 60% of scientific users fall into the research realm of engineering. With 30%, physics is the second largest user community relying on Hermit for their research activities.

Hermit is looking forward to about two more years of operation, but it will soon get support from a follow-up system from Cray. The new Cray XC30 – code named Hornet – will increase performance for HLRS users by a factor of between 4 and 5, and will be operational in 2014. Read the Full Story.

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NICE EnginFrame 2013 Enables Remote Visualization Sessions in the Technical Cloud

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:29:20 +0000

Today Italian HPC solution provider NICE announced the release of the EnginFrame 2013.0 software. Designed for technical computing users in a broad range of markets, EnginFrame simplifies engineering and scientific workflows, increasing productivity and streamlining data and resource management.

With EnginFrame 2013.0 we have further strengthened our technology leadership in the HPC Portal market” , said Giuseppe Ugolotti, CEO of NICE. “NICE EnginFrame is a critical component for anyone who wants to create a technical Cloud that can run at the same time both HPC and interactive workload.”

As an HPC Portal, EnginFrame 2013.0 now offers built-in management of 3D and 2D remote visualization sessions, improved data transfer capabilities and a great number of new features and enhancements addressing both end users’ and system administrators’ needs. Leveraging all the major HPC job schedulers and remote visualization technologies, EnginFrame translates user clicks into the appropriate actions to submit HPC jobs, create remote visualization sessions, and monitor workloads on distributed resources.

Read the Full Story.

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3D Electronic Model-Based Design at Gulfstream

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:40:23 +0000

In this video from the 2013 HPC User Forum, Jeff Kreide from Gulfstream presents: 3D Electronic Model-Based Design.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out the HPC User Forum Video Gallery.

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Powered by HPC, Bloodhound Supercar goes for 1000 MPH

Ralph — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:14:03 +0000

Dr Ben Evans, Bloodhound SSC’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Engineer.

HPC Wales is contributing to the dream of building the world’s car that can break the 1000 mph barrier. Launched in 2007 with the intention of building a rocket-powered car capable of attaining supersonic speeds, the Bloodhound project also aims to inspire young people to take up careers in science and engineering making all of its research and design material available to teachers, students and visitors.

Using high performance computers is the only way, really, you can do realistic flow simulations for a vehicle as complex as this,” said Dr Ben Evans, Bloodhound SSC’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Engineer. There are lots of things we need to understand about the aerodynamics of the vehicle to make sure that it’s safe; we need to understand where the loads are distributed across the vehicle, we need to understand if we’ve got the drag (the resistive force of the air that will be pushing on the car) as low as it can be so that our engines can propel us to the speeds we are going for; and to do the modelling to understand all of that requires some incredibly complex calculations to process massive amounts of data. HPC Wales has been invaluable to us, simply because of the size of the machine and the amount of resource that we’ve got access to. It allows us to run simulations much quicker than we’ve ever been able to do before, which has allowed us to run more simulations than we’ve ever been able to do before. This has allowed us to understand this vehicle better than really we’d ever hoped to be able to do at this stage of the project.

Read the Full Story.

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HPC Wales Announces Innovation Fund to Bring Supercomputing to Industry

Ralph — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:42:40 +0000

HPC Wales has announced a new £300,000 fund, to help fund 20-25 research projects that would benefit from the power of supercomputing technology. Academics and businesses across Wales are being encouraged to apply for a new fund designed to boost collaborative research and innovation projects.

Part-funded by £24 million through the Welsh Government, including support from the European Regional Development Fund, HPC Wales is committed to boosting the Welsh economy by providing academic researchers and businesses with some of the most advanced computing technology in the world.

With access to research funding becoming more and more difficult, we are pleased to be able to offer this support for projects at the leading edge of scientific research,” said David Craddock,Chief Executive of HPC Wales. “We are particularly keen to fund projects that involve collaboration between universities and businesses, and look forward to hearing from researchers looking for a helping hand in taking their projects forward.”

The call also coincides with the final call for HPC Wales Fujitsu funded PhD studentships. Six new studentships are available in the areas of financial and professional services, advanced materials and manufacturing, creative industries, ICT – fourteen have been awarded to date.

The deadline for applications to both funds is May 31, 2013. Read the Full Story.

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New Supercomputing Hub Launches in Swansea

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:14:08 +0000

The new HPC Wales facility in Swansea has been earmarked to become south Wales’ innovation hub for businesses and academic researchers.

Both the Swansea and existing hub in Cardiff have been outfitted with the latest Fujitsu Primergy equipment with Intel Sandy Bridge processors. In this latest Phase-2 development of the pan-Wales distributed network, total capacity will grow to over 17,000 cores and nearly 320 Teraflops of processing power.

HPC Wales aims to make Welsh businesses more competitive in global markets and to grow the knowledge economy as well as creating employment opportunities,” said David Craddock, CEO of HPC Wales. Tod ate over 100 businesses have sought our advice and we have trained over 500 individuals. Since we opened for business in early 2012, demand has been particularly strong from those in the engineering, environment, life sciences and creative industry sectors.

The Swansea-based installation will boast a purpose-built datacenter with an environmentally friendly water-cooling system. Read the Full Story.

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Altair Retools with PBS Analytics 12.0

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:01:54 +0000

Today Altair released PBS Analytics 12.0 in what the company is calling “a giant leap forward” for HPC. Completely redesigned to include new a new high-performance database and more robust data collectors PBS Analytics 12.0 also features a completely new user experience designed to allow users to analyze huge volumes of data quickly and easily.

PBS Analytics is a trusted tool that we rely on extensively,” said Giorgio Giraldi, HPC Systems Administrator at SelexES SpA, and Altair customer. “It’s highly customizable and easy to use, enabling us to analyze usage of HPC resources so that we can plan and correctly identify new business opportunities.”

Read the Full Story.

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Should CFD be an Exact Science?

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 15:04:44 +0000

Over at the IMAGINiT CFD Blog, Ryan Stamm writes that while Computational Fluid Dynamics is not an exact science, it is good engineering.

I’ve been asked to carry out results data to 3 or 4 decimal places! Really? Do results showing 4.015 psi drive product development in a different direction than 4 psi? If so, you don’t need CFD simulation, you need a professor and enough capital to embark on a 6 month research project. Don’t get me wrong, CFD analysis can be exact! However it requires a high degree of scrutiny and more time to capture every minuscule detail. I come across many engineers who feel the need to include every detail is required to derive any value from simulation. This cannot be further from the truth. CFD can be exact but CFD does not have to be exact to drive product development decisions.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Altair – Modeling and Simulation Using HPC

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:00:30 +0000

In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, David W. Bowen from Altair presents: Modeling and Simulation Using HPC.

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Video: Latest Developments in Digital Manufacturing

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:00:29 +0000

In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Dr. Jon Riley from NCMS presents: Latest Developments in Digital Manufacturing.

Twenty years ago General Motors reestablished manufacturing in China and ever since the complex world of global manufacturing has continued to accelerate. What often gets lost in this race is the need for the supply chain to keep pace. The world’s supply chain is comprised of 2,000,000 small and medium sized manufacturers (fewer than 500 employees) which are being tasked to keep up or shut down. At the same time these critical suppliers are being asked for more innovations, quicker and at lower costs. Unfortunately they do not have the technology required to keep pace. This presentation will present the complexity of the challenge ahead for all manufacturers, the opportunity available to those willing to collaboratively develop a solution and the current efforts at NCMS within their Digital Manufacturing Initiative.

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Minding the Missing Middle at Zipp Speed Weaponry

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:45:48 +0000

In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Dr. Josh Poertner, Technical Director at Zipp Speed Weaponry presents: Minding the Missing Middle.

I’ll be talking about how we leveraged a team of folks in your industry to make it happen, and how we had to change everybody’s behavior and expectations to get it done, and how the results turned the bicycle wheel business upside down and gave our company an 2 year head start on an entire new product feature set.

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How Harley-Davidson Builds Bikes Faster with GPU Computing

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:49:15 +0000

One of my favorite talks this week from the GPU Technology Conference was a presentation from Matthew Gueller from Harley-Davidson. Over at the Nvidia Blog, Ken Brown writes that Harley is using GPUs for 3D modeling that cuts months off its design cycle.

Harley-Davidson has been designing and manufacturing motorcycles for over 110 years. While the motorcycles designs remain true to the heritage, the process has evolved to incorporate many new tools into the conceptual design process to reduce the time required to develop new products, improve styling intent and to allow for greater conceptual exploration. By leveraging tools from Bunkspeed, Keyshot, Autodesk, Daussalt and others, we have added flexibility to our process for delivering high quality designs earlier. This presentation will go thru some of the conceptual design workflows and show how Harley-Davidson uses visualization tools to bring it all together. Feedback on GPU vs CPU performance benchmarking done at Harley-Davidson and how these tools are leveraged will be provided.

Read the Full Story.

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Day 3 Keynote from GTC: Behind the Science in Automotive Design

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 07:33:23 +0000

Video streaming by Ustream

At insideHPC, we are very pleased to bring you live streaming keynotes from the GPU Technology Conference this week in San Jose.

Tune in right here on Thursday, March 21 at 11:00am PT for the next keynote as Ralph Gilles from Chrysler Group LLC presents: Behind the Science in Automotive Design.

Ralph Gilles, senior vice president – Product Design and president and CEO – SRT (Street and Racing Technology) Brand and Motorsports at Chrysler Group LLC and the mind behind some of the company’s most innovative products, will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the auto industry. Gilles will review how GPUs are used to advance every step of the automobile development process – from the initial conceptual designs and engineering phases through product assembly and marketing. He will also discuss and how Chrysler Group utilizes GPUs and the latest technologies to build better, safer cars and reduce time to market.

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Interview: How Supercomputers Power Graphene Research

Ralph — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:56:24 +0000

Over at HPC Wales, Biagio Lucini from Swansea University describes how essential supercomputing resources are to his research in the “miracle material” that is graphene.

Our work involves characterising Graphene from its theoretical properties. The material has enormous potential but is not in use on a large scale as of yet, as we don’t know enough about its characteristics. Using supercomputers we will be able to develop an understanding of its theoretical properties using numerical simulations.

Lucini goes on to say that there is a lot of confusion in the outside world about what HPC is and what it is not, and that seeking the right expertise is essential. Read the Full Story.

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PRACE Success Story Wins High Praise

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:19:57 +0000

Since 2012, PRACE has been offering European companies an industrial R&D service, based on a set of complementary high-level services including information and networking, training, access to leading HPC resources and expertise, and code-enabling of open-source applications. Now this documented project offer has been recognised as an effort in catalysing European industrial competitiveness.

The FP7 Success Story Competition highlights the three best success stories from the FP7 Capacities funding programme in e-Infrastructures. Project success stories in the competitive industry category show how the project made Europe a more attractive location to invest in research and innovation, by promoting activities where businesses set the agenda. The project is aimed at helping innovative SMEs to grow into world-leading companies.

PRACE’s proposal paper, How E-research Infrastructures can Catalyse European industrial Competitiveness, was selected as the winner of the competitive industry category. The paper describes PRACE’s continuous commitment to develop services for industry to benefit from PRACE research infrastructure.

Since the establishment of the PRACE Open R&D industrial offer in January 2012, PRACE has been able to attract more than 10 European companies; large companies as well as SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) for using its HPC facilities as well as the other high-value services.

This award in ‘competitive industries’ will foster our motivation to work on engaging industrial users on the PRACE research infrastructure in order to boost European competitiveness,” said Stephane Requena, author of the project paper and member of the board of directors of PRACE. “PRACE is working on increasing the use of a leading European infrastructure by all academic and industrial communities and is catalysing technological transfer between academia and industry through open innovation projects. In that sense we are working in the field of the FP7 funded PRACE-3IP implementation project on a tailored evangelisation programme called SHAPE (SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) which aims to help SMEs to co-design and demonstrate a concrete industrial project on PRACE facilities.”

Download the award-winning success story (PDF).

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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HPC Midlands to Host Open House for Research & Industry

Ralph — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:03:33 +0000

The HPC Midlands supercomputing facility will host their launch event in the U.K. on March 20. As a provider of state-of-the-art e-infrastructure for research and industry, HPC Midlands features a 3,000 core supercomputer combined with HPC expertise from Loughborough University and the University of Leicester.

Since establishing HPC Midlands with the financial backing of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, we have worked closely with academic colleagues and a range of industrial partners to refine the service to ensure that it meets business as well as academic needs,” said Dr Steven Kenny, Director of HPC Midlands. “Now we are ready to invite small and large businesses with specialist computing requirements to come along and see how they can benefit from this world-class facility.”

The launch event will give delegates the chance to meet the team behind HPC Midlands and explore opportunities for collaboration. Case study presentations will showcase how company’s like Tata Steel, E.ON, and Rolls Royce already benefit from working closely with HPC Midlands. Read the Full Story.

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Altair HyperWorks 12 Release Focuses on Simulation-Driven Design

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:43:58 +0000

Today Altair announced the release of the HyperWorks 12.0 computer-aided engineering platform. With new functionalities and end-user productivity advancements in product optimization, Version 12 has already received accolades from customer beta users.

The new 3D capability creates a fully-immersive environment that improves our ability to support conceptual design and analysis efforts,” said Jonathan Gabrys, Technical Fellow of The Boeing Company. “Specifically, being able to interrogate complex analysis results, such as stress fields or deflections, using 3D visualization provides an enhanced level of understanding.”

Read the Full Story.

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A*Star in Singapore Powers SMBs with HPC

Ralph — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:39:47 +0000

Can government-sponsored HPC successfully foster Small and Medium businesses? Over at ZD Net, Liau Yun Qing writes that ERS Industries is using HPC resources at Singapore’s A*Star Institute to slash its product development time.

Modeling and simulation helped the company cut down development time and prototyping costs. Cheong said previously it would take about 1 to 2 years to come up with a new product as it needed to build and test prototypes. Through HPC-enabled simulation and modeling, the time was cut down to 3 to 4 months, he said.

The A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (ACRC) recently doubled its capacity with 100 Teraflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. Read the Full Story.

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