Learning from the Leaders

Many companies already leverage HPC resources strategically and successfully to achieve engineering insights that can result in innovation and a sustained market advantage. They are are combining HPC environments and ANSYS solutions to accomplish incredibly complex engineering simulations that would not have been possible even five years ago. Through strategic deployment, they are realizing a significant return on their HPC investment.

To meet the sometimes-conflicting demands of clients, the commercial aircraft industry is under intense pressure to reduce the cost of every flight, satisfy tightening environmental regulations, and transport passengers whose flight experience expectations are constantly increasing — all the while satisfying regulatory demands for airworthiness and safety mandated by regulators. When you couple this with the need to deliver a product to market as quickly as possible and to minimize ongoing operational and maintenance costs, it is clear to see why the industry is at the forefront, applying advanced engineering simulation technology and HPC. Parker Aerospace and Volvo Aero are two companies that have implemented HPC in innovative ways. Parker Aerospace has turned workstations into a virtual cluster and Volvo Aero has made ANSYS tools, including HPC, part of its Life Tracking System to determine the life of engine parts and to reduce maintenance costs for customers.

NVIDIA is not only an industry leader in enabling technology for HPC; the company employs simulation and high-performance computing in the design of its own products including 3-D glasses and PCBs. Consulting company EURO/CFD employs an HPC cluster, the largest among small- and medium-sized businesses in France, to solve complex problems for customers in a wide range of industries. This issue features these and many other case studies.

As customer examples demonstrate, ANSYS users today scale their largest simulations across thousands of processing cores, conducting simulations with more than a billion cells. They create incredibly dense meshes, model complex geometries, and consider complicated multiphysics phenomena. While the sophistication and scale of tomorrow’s simulations may dwarf today’s efforts — which is hard for any of us to fathom — one element will remain constant. ANSYS is committed to delivering HPC performance and capability to take  customers to new heights of simulation fidelity, engineering insight and continuous innovation.