HPC for Vehicle Safety Simulation

Market forces and strong competition are pushing companies to bring products to market more quickly and to reduce development costs to an absolute minimum. This is particularly evident in advanced engineering, where the demand for greater fidelity within ever more complex computational models is continually growing. The results of this are growing challenges in terms of affordable software and the need to access appropriate compute power required to deliver the desired quality of results within acceptable timescales.

Applications such as LS-DYNA have transformed this aspect of vehicle design, largely removing the extremely costly and time consuming process of physical vehicle impact testing during the design process. For their automotive OEM customers, Simpact needed to up-scale their compute capability to meet the demands of our largest and most detailed customer models by running LS-DYNA3D on 128CPU's. To achieve this they turned to OCF and their HPC on demand enCORE service. Based at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council in Daresbury, their HPC is listed amongst the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. See www.top500.org

As part of the incorporation of the facility with the Simpact compute network, they carried out benchmarking to assess the performance of the system and investigate the up scaling of the MPP version of LS-DYNA3D. Benchmark models include the well-known Chrysler Neon car-to-car vehicle model which is available from LSTC and benchmarked in detail by http://www.topcrunch.org. The graph below shows some of the results from the benchmark exercise.

Tim Williams, Commercial Director of Simpact said, “To date, we have been able to run up to 28CPU of LS-DYNA in our Warwick office. With the use of the enCORE hardware we are now able to run large models in less than half the elapsed time. This has had a significant impact on our product development process and the time to deliver crash results"

"Some of our Automotive OEM customers want to run the largest vehicle models and represent structures with unusually small finite elements. We now run these models on 128 CPU's as this delivers optimum performance."

Simpact’s CAE engineers spent a significant amount of time working with the IT specialists at OCF for the integration of their office based LS-DYNA licence. Customer confidentiality is key for Simpact and they were reassured by the security measures OCF have in place.

Dirk Landheer, joint founder and Director of Simpact, commented, “OCF allowed us to rapidly upscale our CPU capacity. This makes is possible for specialist SMEs such as Simpact to meet the demand from large OEMs where previously this was the domain of only a handful of international companies.”