Let’s start the conversation here – Modern engineers are facing a perfect storm of design challenges. Why? With embedded software and electronics now the foundation of most products, the stakes have been raised around innovation and increased complexity. Tighter budgets and a stricter regulatory climate are dictating the need for smaller product envelopes and new material choices. Engineers are tasked with these demands against a backdrop of fewer resources and shrinking time-to-market cycles.
In this whitepaper from IBM – you’ll begin to understand how advanced simulation software can dramatically shorten the design phase by allowing engineers to virtually optimize and validate new ideas earlier in the process, minimizing the expense of building physical prototypes and streamlining real-world testing.
While advanced simulation and visualization form the cornerstone of design optimization, hardware has been a bottleneck, particularly for smaller firms. Mid-sized companies and engineering departments within larger organizations have historically been shut out from traditional high performance computing (HPC) environments — the gold standard for advanced simulation — because of their cost and complexity. While increasingly powerful multi-core workstations set simulation and design optimization in motion, there are limitations from both a performance and workflow standpoint.
Here’s an important point to remember: The latest generation of highly scalable HPC clusters is a game changer for design optimization challenges. HPC clusters, built on a modular, multi-core x86 architecture, provide a cost effective and accessible platform on which to conduct realistic simulation compared with the “big iron” systems of the past or with the latest workstation models.
An HPC cluster delivers a superior price/performance advantage for simulation for a number of reasons.
- HPC clusters aggregate computing horsepower from a pool of processors ranging from as few as 24 cores up to thousands of cores, enabling a system to easily scale.
- HPC clusters support parallel processing, which breaks up complex tasks like simulation into smaller jobs that are simultaneously run in order to deliver results in significantly less time.
But when it comes to truly driving design optimization – what are some ways to that organizations can ensure that HPC clusters are the right fit and the deployment is smooth? Download this whitepaper today to learn the Six Steps to HPC Clusters – which include:
- Defining your business problem and scope of your project.
- Assembling your project team.
- Specifying your cluster needs.
- Deploying your cluster.
- Optimizing your cluster for faster results.
- Proactively maintaining your cluster.
Instead of HPC being a specialized resource, today’s HPC clusters empower mainstream engineers and non-specialists to take ownership of exploring their own complex simulation and modeling problems instead of having to rely on over-extended IT departments to set up and oversee the efforts. Clusters, paired with new, parallelized versions of simulation and modeling tools, finally democratize HPC capabilities, giving engineering teams of all sizes the chance to blaze new innovations and chart a course to design efficiencies that will propel their businesses to new heights.
You can download this white paper now from the insideHPC White Paper Library.
