Engineering Simulation Solutions and HPC

Engineering Simulation Solutions & 

High Performance Computing 

Timothy Kwan 

Regional Business Manager 

CAD-IT Consultants 

© 2007 ANSYS, Inc. All rights reser ved. 1 June 2007 ANSYS, Inc. Proprietar y

CAD-IT Consultants 

• Brief History : 

– Formed in 1991 (Singapore) 

– Malaysian operations started in 1994 

– China offices set up starting 1997 

– Thailand representative office opened in 2001 

• Regional channel partner for: 

– ANSYS simulation solutions: ANSYS Multiphysics, FLUENT, CFX, 

AUTODYN, Icepak etc 

– CEI visualization solutions: Ensight 

– SFTC’s metal forming processes simulation solution: DEFORM 

– Moldflow’s plastics flow simulation solutions: MPA, MPI etc 

– IMC’s problem solving and idea generation solution: Goldfire Innovator 

• HP, Microsoft WCCS and ANSYS collaboration partner 

© 2008 ANSYS, Inc. All rights reser ved. 2 ANSYS, Inc. Pr oprietary

What is CAE? 

• Computer-Aided Engineering (often referred to as CAE) is the use of 

information technology for supporting engineers in tasks such as 

– Analysis 

– Simulation 

– Design 

– Manufacture 

– Planning 

– Diagnosis 

– Repair 

• CAE tools, are software that have been developed: 

– for providing support to the activities above 

– to analyze the robustness and performance of components and 

assemblies 

– to help support design teams in decision making 


What is CAE? 

• CAE areas covered include: 

– Structural analysis on components and assemblies using FEA 

(Finite Element Analysis) 

– Thermal and fluid flow analysis using CFD (Computational 

Fluid Dynamics) 

– Rigid multibody dynamics or mechanical systems motion 

simulation 

– Analysis tools for process simulation of operations such as 

casting, molding, and die press forming 

– Optimization of the product or process 


CAE Technology Application Trends: 

Need More Fidelity 

No Missed Hot Spots! 

Where are the hotspots? 

• 10 load cases 

• Fatigue calculations 

• Known a priori? 

• Need to submodel? 



Reduce Engineering Time 

Direct CAD to Mesh 

• No defeaturing 

• No mid-planing 

• No shells 

• No beams 

• … 

No Simplifications! 



Model Complete Assemblies 

Work-Years to Work-Days! 

Model Complete Assembly 

• No BC assumptions 

• All parts CAD-to-mesh 

• Automatic contact 



Include All Physics 

Nano-sphere accuracy benchmark 

Courtesy: Andreas, Hieke 

Include All Physics 

• Analyses closely match 

reality 

• Reduced assumptions that 

question certainty and 

compromise accuracy 

• Lower cost due to R&D 

process compression 

• Lower cost due to fewer 

analysis software tools to 

purchase, learn and manage 

No Simplified Behavior! 



More Understanding 

Simulation Driven Product Development 

• Understand Completely 

• Innovate Consistently 

• Fail Early and Often 


Why Use Clusters For CAE? 

• Clusters enable bigger simulations (more accuracy) 

– Typical FEA models require 4-8 GB RAM 

• Today’s more demanding models might consume 100 GB 

– Typical CFD models require 2-10 GB RAM 

• Today’s more demanding models might consume 50-100 GB 

• Clusters deliver turnaround time 

– Clusters can yield nearly linear scaling 

• A typical simulation might run for 8 hours on a single CPU 

→Becomes 1 hour on an eight-core cluster 

• Clusters can scale up with demand 

– More simulations (more design options) 

• Optimization studies might require 50-100 simulations 


ANSYS and HPC 

Computer Aided Engineering Software 

– for Simulation Driven Product Development 

• Deliver superior product designs 

– Explore innovations in features, function 

• Improve time to market 

– Faster and earlier than physical testing 

• Lower product development costs 

– Virtual prototyping vs. physical testing 


Simulation Drivers for HPC 

~ 25 Million DOF Stress 

Analysis of a Front 

Suspension 

Number of Parts 

Contact Pairs 

Nodes 

CONTACT Elements 

SOLID186/187 Elements 

CEs 

No. of Equations (DOFs) 

75 

291 

8,080,601 

382,492 

5,438,005 

0 

24,241,803 

Modeled on a Desktop 

Solved on a Cluster 


Simulation Drivers for HPC 

• GE CRD test for parallel scalability… 

towards full 360°blade row simulations 

– One passage mesh 

• approx. 1 M nodes 

– Full annulus of 92 passages 

• 88M nodes 

Number of 

Passages 

Mesh 

Nodes 

Definition 

File Size 

Number of 

CPUs 

True Wall 

Clock Time 

1 1.0M 20Mb 1 7.22 hrs 

92 88M 2407Mb 90 7.75 hrs 

Courtesy GE Corporate R&D Center 


ANSYS Mechanical HPC 

11.0 SP1 Benchmark Suite 


Performance Results - ANSYS 

“ANSYS parallel processing has been a key enabler 

for our simulation group. We are now tackling jobs 

that we simply wouldn’t have before by moving 

towards complete system level analysis from single 

component analysis. The analysis team is now 

responding to the design team much faster with 

accurate results from ANSYS!” 

– Jason Longstaffe, Principal Engineer 


FLUENT 6.3 HPC on WCCS 

FLUENT 6.3.26 – FL5L1 (.86M), FL5L2 (3.6M) 

Microsoft Windows CCS 

HP CP3000 ProLiant BL460c 

Xeon Dual Core 3.0GHz Voltaire IB 

Over 26x 

faster on 

32 cores 


Performance Results - FLUENT 

“The ability to deploy a cluster using Windows 

Compute Cluster Server was very attractive to us, 

because it leverages our expertise and fits into our 

current computing environment. The deployment 

was quite smooth: we had our cluster up and 

running FLUENT within two weeks. The integration 

of FLUENT with the Microsoft Job Scheduler is 

especially valuable, giving us the ability to manage 

and monitor multiple simulations on the cluster”. 

– Charles Ulrich, IT Manager, Alden Research 

Laboratory Inc. 


AUTODYN HPC 

30 

25 

Relative Performance 

20 

15 

10 

AUTODYN 

Ideal Scaling 

5 

0 

1 2 4 8 16 24 

Number of Cores 

Blast 

Containment 

Analysis 


Performance Results - AUTODYN 

“By conducting these AUTODYN simulations 

prior to the physical test, WTD 52 is able to 

reduce the number of costly tests and to 

enhance the quality of the experimental 

investigations. As a result, time and cost 

savings can be achieved in most cases.” 

– Michael Klaus, Deputy Director WTD 52 


DEFORM and HPC 

♦ 

Metal forming involves very complex nonlinear 

processes 

♦ 

DEFORM is used to: 

• Predict process behaviour before it’s tried on the shop floor 

• Identify root cause of defects which occur in production 

• Investigate alternatives 

♦ 

Example: 

• Hot forging with flash of steering link 

• About 50,000 elements 

• Single stroke pressing

Link Time Test Results 

Computer 

Approx Cost 

Run Time 

Best 

affordable 

performance 

Hp xw8400 Intel 3.00GB 2x dual core 

Xeon. 8GB Ram 

$5500 

hr:min 

4 proc: 1:24 

HP DL 360 Intel Xeon 2 x Quad core 

(18 month old computer) 

Quad core chips are 

currently not 

recommended 

2 proc: 2:33 

4 proc: 2:08 

8 proc: 2:22 

HP XC Cluster – 4 nodes 

Each node 1 Xeon dual core 

Infiniband networking 

$40,000-$60,000 

(custom ordered) 

2 proc: 1:55 

4 proc: 1:11 

8 proc: 0:57 

Great 

performance 

under $1000 

HP a6130 AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ 

Dual core processor 3 GB RAM 

$700 

2 proc: 2:50 

HP xw9400 AMD Opteron \ 

Dual Processor (about 3 years old) 

$6000 

(2 years ago) 

2 proc: 3:03 

Dell 1.7 GHz Dual Xeon processor 

(about 6 years old) 

About $3000 

(5 years ago) 

2 proc: 7:31

Cluster Performance – 

Large Model 

Weld Yoke forging 

CG-Direct 

Rigid Plastic w/p 

Non-isothermal 

- 600K tet 

8 processors 

CG FEM 15h 48m 

Remesh 8h 50m (#56) 

Total Time 24h 38m 

HP Linux Cluster, 4 nodes, 8 processors, 3.0GHz 5160 Xeon, 4GB memory 

Weld Yoke courtesy American Axle and Manufacturing

Ensight and HPC 

• Extreme post-processing and visualization 

solutions for CFD/FEA/CAE systems 

• Ensight takes full advantage of parallel 

processing and cluster based rendering for 

analyzing, visualizing and communicating highend 

scientific and engineering datasets

Ensight and HPC 

“Using EnSight as a communication tool is as important as the FEA 

analysis itself” 

Kumar Kulkarni, Lead FEA Analysis, VISTEON 

“The more realistic my analysis results look, the better my customers 

understand them, and the larger my budget grows.” 

Jim Johnson, CFD Technical Lead, GM 

EnSight images courtesy of 

Sauber Petronas F1

Ensight DR 

Distributed Rendering with Vis Clusters 

Render client 1 

Render client 3 

Composite 

4 servers sending data to 

4 clients 

Render client 3 Render client 4

Ensight Animation 

EnSight animation by Advantage CFD for 

Honda F1 team

Ensight Animation 

POV-Ray animation of periodic ship oscillation 

Courtesy of Dr. Kenji Takizawa, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Thank You. 

Email: timothy.kwan@cadit.com.sg 

URL: www.cadit.com.sg

Engineering Simulation Solutions and HPC

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