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HPC via mouse clickNew approaches in engineering simulation

David Heiny, SimScale GmbH

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Agenda

1) Status quo of CAE in regards to HPC in general

2) New opportunities

3) New approaches

4) CAE via web-browser

5) Application example

6) Summary & Perspective

Status Quo, new opportunities and perspective of CAE & HPC

Fig.1: Airflow simulation within a room – typically a very compute-intensive simulation job which needs considerable computing resources

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Who are we?Meet the team

● Founded in 2011 as a CAE consultancy

● Platform development started in 2012

● Platform launch: Q3/2013

● Engineers, Mathematicians andComputer Scientists TU München

● Based in Garching, near Munich

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Status quoGrowing complexity of simulation models → Growing need for HPC

Fig.2: Growing complexity of simulation models and methods

● Increasing complexity of simulation models and methods

● Increasing level of accuracy● Sophisticated solver technology● Multiphysics simulation● Optimization studies● ...

→ Need for more computing capacity

● Many challenges involved with classical HPC resources for simulation● Fixed costs for hardware● Limiting license models of

software providers● Deployment, maintenance, aging...

→ HPC resources “hard to access”

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New opportunitiesWeb 2.0, Industry 4.0, the Cloud & Co open up new opportunities

Compute nodesClient

SSL

Data processing,Rendering

Displaying,interaction

Fig.3: Sketch of the “Thin-client” principle

Fig.4: WebGL enabling responsive and fast displaying of large 3D data sets via web-browser

● Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)● Growing number of providers● Growing number of types● Rapidly decreasing prices

● Modern SW-development technologies● In-browser client-side rendering● Server-side rendering ● Growing functionality of IaaS-APIs● New programming frameworks

for web application development

● End user trends● Growing number of portable devices

in the business context● Availability of broadband internet● Distributed teams

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New kinds of access to HPC for CAEThis leads to new approaches to HPC access: “Via a mouse-click”

Remote Desktop

● Software running on a remotecomputer is accessed via desktop “forwarding”

+ Limited data traffic necessary+ Power of the remote mach- ine for all tasks

- Means managing two com- puters on file system level- Certain license requirements- No offline mode

“Extended” Desktop

● Classical local desktop simu-lation software with the ability to solve externally

+ No new workflows+ Offline mode possible

- All data needs to be trans- ferred (especially results)- Limited monitoring of remote computing- Local post-processing

Webservice

● The complete simulation work-flow is ported into a browser-based user interface

+ Optimized for web-based access+ Complexity of the additional remote hardware hidden (“end-to-end” approach)

- No offline mode

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The SimScale platformAn example for a new kind of engineering software

CAD Upload Simulation Design decision

● The user uploads a CAD-model of his mechanical design to SimScale

● Interaction in 3D viastandard web browser

● The user sets up asimulation ranging fromstructural mechanics,acoustics, fluid dynamics, to thermodynamics

● Results are displayed in 3D

● The user can validate /modify the design based on the gained insights

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The SimScale platformThe infrastructure: A distributed hardware and software system.

User Frontend Web Server CAE Backend

● No special HW / SW requirements

● Reliable internetaccess

● Browser-based● General data

management, storage & backup

● On-demand compu-ting power

● Different IaaS prov-iders available

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The SimScale platformThe architecture: A generic environment delivering CAE functionality

Collaboration Simulation setup

User interaction 3rd-party solver

● Simulation / Projectsharing remotely

● Colleagues, Clients

● Meta layer describesthe type of analysis

● Solver agnostic

● 3D Rendering● Intpretation of the

meta layer

● Actual computing. Currently:OpenFOAM / CalculiX /Code_Aster / SU2 / Gerris /FEniCS / ...

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Application exampleMixing behavior of a pipe joint – analyzed via a web-browser

Live / Video demo

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Summary and outlookThe “take-aways” of this presentation

● High performance computing resources have and will become more accessiblethan ever before

● New kinds of CAE workflows to accessHPC resources with different advantagesand disadvantages (the use-case matters)

● The usage of HPC will become economically feasible in a growing numberof simulation projects

● The future of CAE and HPC staysinteresting! Fig.5: Acoustic eigenmodes within a car cabin – many simulation types

can be compute intensive and therefore a good candidate for HPC

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Thank you.