Today Penguin Computing announced that Oracle Team USA is using Penguin Computing on Demand (POD) in conjunction with NUMECA’s FINE/Marine CFD software for hydrodynamic modeling.
POD is a public HPC cloud service that provides on-demand, high-performance supercomputing capabilities on a pay-as-you-go basis. ORACLE TEAM USA is using Penguin Computing’s cloud to launch 200 to 500 FINE/Marine CFD runs per week, enabling them to optimize the design of their hydrofoil and hull, as well as perform aerodynamic modeling of the sail for their America’s Cup racing boat.
We appreciate the consistent quality of the cores that are being made available to us by Penguin Computing, enabling us flexibility in terms of volume load. The interactive framework is convenient to implement and allows us to use POD not only for solving, but also for pre- and post-processing,” said Len Imas, senior CFD engineer for Oracle Team USA.
In this video, Oracle Team USA sails its AC45S for the first time in Bermuda.
As opposed to the physical testing of designs, which America’s Cup competitors used to rely on, the role of CFD modeling and the capabilities provided by software providers such as NUMECA has grown increasingly important in the past 15 years. One reason for this change is the flexibility in improving designs– being able to turn over a variety of designs quickly in a computational environment–instead of contending with the time constraints of re-testing a physical model in a tank under different conditions. By utilizing POD in conjunction with FINE/Marine, Oracle Team USA has not only obtained the best solver speed in the marine hydrodynamics industry, but also found an HPC environment compatible with their computational needs.
Penguin Computing’s POD HPC service is designed to take the complexity and high costs out of cloud computing,” said Victor Gregorio, VP/GM of Cloud Services at Penguin Computing. “We are very proud to have NUMECA as a POD partner and to offer on-demand, reliable supercomputing solutions to NUMECA customers like Oracle Team USA.”