Hexagon Uses Fugaku Supercomputer to Revolutionize Product Development Simulations

Stockholm, Sweden – Hexagon AB, a global leader in sensor, software, and autonomous solutions, has demonstrated how complex CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations that were previously time-consuming and expensive can now be completed using the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku. Using the power of simulation, the company’s Manufacturing Intelligence division showed that the performance of next-generation aircraft and electric vehicles can be explored in greater detail and with more iterations. Manufacturers can analyze all of the complexities of reality with less than half the energy and at a fraction of the cost of traditional simulation methods by utilizing cutting-edge semiconductors.

Simulate Complex Designs with Ease

CFD simulations necessitate a significant amount of computational power and resources. As a result, engineers must spend many hours simplifying a real product design just so that it can be simulated to ensure that it performs as expected. This manual process can consume up to 90 percent of an engineer’s time in some cases, and engineers are increasingly being challenged to ‘scale-up’ simulations to manage more elements. Consequently, the cost and time required to perform these simulations are prohibitively high, and engineers can only simulate an approximation of a product.

Customers of Hexagon’s Cradle CFD will now be able to leverage the power of the ARM-based Fugaku computer architecture to perform complex simulations quickly and easily. This is made possible by a new partnership that will enable customers to use Cradle CFD software on Fujitsu Limited’s commercially available Supercomputer PRIMEHPC series, which employs Fugaku technology.

Engineers will now be able to simulate complex designs without having to simplify them, saving time while also providing access to significantly increased details. As a result, they will be able to explore multiple design options more quickly, using simulation more frequently to refine and test their designs, as well as explore new concepts that can not be explored with physical testing or simulation today. Manufacturers will now benefit from the increased speed and detail. Their engineers could also use this type of simulation regularly, as the architecture uses roughly one-third of the energy of the computers they currently use, lowering costs and improving environmental sustainability.

Simulation Insights Aid Sectors

This breakthrough is game-changing for engineers in a variety of industries, including automotive, aerospace, and construction, all of which require the insights provided by large-scale CFD simulation. This is especially important at a time when the automotive and aerospace industries are racing to bring new forms of mobility and electrified transportation to the market. Automotive OEMs, for example, are under pressure to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

Manufacturers can run more simulations to better understand how the aerodynamics of a new model impacts energy efficiency and range and iterate more between design and engineering to achieve the optimal design by saving time on manual processes like meshing. Thermal management is also important in electric vehicles because controlling a vehicle’s heat optimizes its performance, safety, and longevity – all of which are major challenges for the EV market. Understanding these issues through higher-resolution simulations allows engineers to achieve optimal designs and bring models with an appealing design and range to the market more quickly.

Executing Test Simulations

Experts from Hexagon worked closely with Fujitsu Limited to optimize the Cradle CFD code for use on Fugaku and complete test simulations. A typical family car was simulated in its entirety, which could only be done with increased computational power. This model had 70 million elements using 960 cores and was simulated until steady state using the RANS equation over 1000 cycles.

In aerospace, the impact of turbulence that forms around an aircraft’s wings is critical to how it is controlled and its safety. Turbulence is caused by a large number of vortices, some of which are so small that they are impossible to simulate using current methods. Engineers can now achieve a higher resolution simulation using Cradle technology and Fugaku’s extra computational resources, enabling them to better understand the effect of turbulence on the structural safety of the aircraft and the forces it can withstand. This is essential for the development of the next generation of aircraft, including supersonic and hypersonic aircraft, for which engineers must understand the behavior of shockwaves around the aircraft.

The team completed a test simulation of transonic compressible fluid around an aeroplane with success. Transonic analysis is important for the design of safe and efficient aircraft, as it enables engineers to understand what happens when air flows around a wing control surface. The simulation comprised approximately 230 million elements and was tested using 4,000 nodes (192,000 computing cores), along with using 48,000 processes via the Message Passing Interface (MPI) as well as 4 threads via the OpenMP application programming interface.

Leaders Speak

Roger Assaker, President, Design & Engineering, Manufacturing Intelligence division, Hexagon, said, “Simulation holds the key to innovations in aerospace and eMobility. Advances such as the low-power Fugaku supercomputing architecture are one of the ways we can tap into these insights without costing the Earth, and I am delighted by what our Cradle CFD team and our partners have achieved.”

Masahide Fujisaki, Executive Director, Fujitsu Limited, elaborated, “Fujitsu was pleased to have the chance to work with Software Cradle Co, Ltd to tune and validate the performance of the scFLOW's solver for large models on the supercomputer Fugaku and the Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC series, which utilizes the technology of Fugaku. In the future, we look forward to working together with vendors to optimize commercial applications and contribute to the industrial use of Fugaku, while simultaneously offering the Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC series to manufacturers and other companies so that the results of this work can be widely used in the industry."

Tomohiro Irie, Director, R&D, Cradle CFD, added, “By using the efficient computing power of Fugaku with our simulation tools, we will encourage users to simulate phenomena that simply weren’t feasible before due to the computation time and cost. Today we have simulated 192,000 elements, but this is only the beginning – because Cradle CFD is used in diverse applications, I expect that these technical developments will contribute to making the power of Fugaku more accessible for general use, bringing huge freedom and improved insights to engineering teams solving tomorrow’s problems today. Both Cradle CFD and Fugaku are based in Japan, and I believe we can leverage these excellent achievements globally through Hexagon’s network.”

Image Source: Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence