Summary: Over the last two decades, numerical simulation has become a key enabler for innovation in manufacturing. The capability to simulate the features of a new product, without the need to build a physical prototype, has lowered both cost and time to market and enabled the design of better products. The objective of this experiment was to demonstrate that by combining High-Performance Computing (HPC) and optimisation software, there is an opportunity to change current design practices and bring automatic shape optimisation (ASO) to a wider audience of manufacturing SMEs. The goal was to develop and implement an HPC- cloud-based platform that gave the inexperienced user the possibility to optimise automatically the shape of a particular mechanical system. The aim was to text this solution using practical test cases from the end-user Lamborghini.
There are several issues associated to the use of automatic shape optimization. It takes significant computational power, since many simulations need to be evaluated. Only specialised engineers with an in-depth knowledge of the product can set up a viable ASO procedure. Several different software packages need to be interfaced and integrated into a single platform. The challenge facing this experiment was therefore to develop a platform which combined Cloud-based HPC resources with in-house computing capabilities, to develop an intuitive user interface providing an integrated solution for non-expert users and to create a one-stop-shop for end-users who are only occasional users of ASO.
The SOUTH platform which provides an integrated
environment, granting access to the necessary optimization software and to adequate computing resources, both in-house and Cloud-based HPC, has been developed. An easy-to-use graphical user interface has been designed with an optimal trade-off between easiness of use and flexibility. While there is a high degree of automation, the user retains the possibility of interacting with the optimisation process by stopping it and investigating partial solutions. This permits the user to exploit his own expertise and effectively steer the optimisation towards the optimal design. An inexperienced user in terms of optimization, but experienced in terms of numerical simulation, can easily and autonomously set up an optimization run
The SOUTH platform constitutes an innovative and cost-effective approach to making shape-optimisation software available to small and medium-sized enterprises, which do not employ this software on an everyday basis, which cannot afford to have permanent in-house expertise in optimisation and which cannot afford the necessary computing resources. Furthermore, the SOUTH platform allows Lamborghini to scale-out during productivity peaks to avoid bottlenecks due to limited in-house capacity. The possibility to deal with simulation peaks in this way enables much more cost-effective computing to be performed.
The use of SOUTH was able to reduce the effort for a typical optimisation from 2.25 person months to 2.0 days and the elapsed simulation time from 3 months to less than 10 days.
Timeframe: July 2015 – December 2016
People: Edmondo Minisci, Annalisa Riccardi
Partners: Optimad, Cineca, Lamborghini
The official page of the experiment: https://www.fortissimo-project.eu/experiments/607
Sponsors: The SOUTH experiment is part of the FP7 FORTISSIMO project https://www.fortissimo-project.eu/
