There’s a whole new generation of computer-aided design and collaborative software reshaping manufacturing. Engineers and designers can define a problem via goals and constraints and let artificial intelligence (AI) generate solutions.
At Supercomputing 2021 (SC21), we are introducing new solutions to help customers speed time to market with computer-aided engineering and design. We’re also introducing expanded HPC/AI managed services, a new Dell EMC PowerSwitch, and new accelerator options for PowerEdge servers, all designed to support organizations to better tackle modeling and simulation-intensive workloads such as product development.
Small gains equal big competitive advantage
In Formula One racing, cars often exceed 200 miles per hour on the straightaways of the many track circuits they race across the globe. At those speeds, small differences in a car’s aerodynamics can make big differences in race outcomes. After all, the disparities between the fastest and slowest cars are as small as 4%, and among the top five cars those can be even smaller — a razor-thin 0.15%.
Much of those engineering changes involve aerodynamic simulations on 3D digital twins — virtual proxies of the physical cars in software — using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). These complex studies are conducted via the latest high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure at McLaren’s U.K. headquarters. If green-lighted, a component will be prototyped at a reduced scale and tested in a wind tunnel. To make crucial decisions about the races and the cars, data is also accessed in near real-time by McLaren engineers both with a trackside modular data center at the edge, and at mission control.
“Our cars are streaming hundreds of thousands of data points every second,” says Edward Green, principal digital architect at McLaren Racing. “Each car transmits key telemetry data in real time, and our trackside IT infrastructure from Dell Technologies relays it to our headquarters engineers, who use our HPC and advanced simulations to find ways to boost performance even more.”
To democratize HPC for computer-aided engineering and design, new and updated Dell Technologies Validated Designs are available for Siemens Simcenter Star CCM+. These systems provide engineering innovation with multi-physics CFD simulation on the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with PowerSwitch and InfiniBand networking, with options for HPC storage. With engineering-validation, sizing and benchmark results, these scalable systems are easy to install, configure and manage, with services and support readily available.
It’s closed-loop innovation supported by Dell Technologies that helps keep McLaren Racing ahead of the pack.” – Edward Green, principal digital architect, @McLarenF1
Make a big difference for the environment
From its earliest years, Wirth Research leveraged in-house HPC systems to run its CFD workloads, and over time, those systems grew into a rather large and energy-hungry cluster. This created a bit of a paradox for the company. In its day-to-day work, Wirth Research was helping its clients cut their energy consumption, but in doing so, it was consuming a relatively large amount of electricity.
“With our passion for sustainability and the pandemic forcing everyone to work from home, we saw an opportunity to massively reduce our carbon footprint by relocating our computing resources to [Verne Global] Iceland,” Rob Rowsell, head of built environment at Wirth Research says. “And now we’re able to provide sustainable solutions to our clients using a zero-carbon tool. I don’t know of anyone else who can do that.”
Verne Global, a Dell Technologies service provider partner, makes the shift to hosted resources easy for its clients from virtual desktops to HPC/AI. The firm offers services and capabilities that go far beyond the general Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings of today’s hyperscale cloud data centers. Through its HPC managed services offerings, the company provides customizable bare-metal servers on a reserved and on-demand basis, with all resources supported by a highly knowledgeable HPC technical team. And, of course, it’s all powered by Iceland’s plentiful supply of clean energy at a predictable price.
New Dell EMC PowerSwitch and PowerEdge GPU options
The all-new Dell EMC PowerSwitch S5448F-ON top-of-rack switch enables customers with the latest generation of servers, storage and hyperconverged infrastructure platforms to increase throughput while providing agility, automation and integration in their data center. In addition to higher density with 100/400 GbE speeds, the new S5448F-ON helps simplify complex network design, deployment and maintenance when running the Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10 with integrated SmartFabric Services, or Dell EMC CloudIQ for cloud-based monitoring, machine learning and predictive analytics.
Inside Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Dell Technologies now offers AMD Instinct™ Mi-210 series GPUs. Also available are NVIDIA A2 and A16 Tensor Core GPUs to accelerate everything from virtual workstations to rack-level computer-aided engineering and design workloads.