An engineer's best friend

2010-08-09T16:53:00Z

Welcome to the Dezineforce blog. I’m Prof Simon Cox, chief scientist at Dezineforce and director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at the University of Southampton. In this blog I’ll be sharing my thoughts, experience and observations on topics connected (sometimes very loosely I’m sure!) to computer aided engineering (CAE) and high performance & high productivity computing (HPC) as they apply across a range of industries including aerospace and defence, energy, photonics, civil engineering and automotive.

Dezineforce specialises in HPC based engineering simulation and design optimisation solutions that enable engineers to work more productively and create better designs. We tag ourselves as the engineer’s best friend and by that we mean that we have looked at all the problems engineers face and then removed the hassle of IT, freeing them up to focus on complex design challenges. With our HPC appliance essentially what we’ve done is create a ‘white goods’ version of super computing, which companies can invest in and deploy in-house rather like a new washing machine or fridge. We don’t think HPC need be anymore complicated than that.

One of the key features of our HPC appliance is a specialised scheduler that is aware of the engineering tasks designers are performing. This allows engineers to submit complex jobs and have them processed as the simulation license becomes free whilst maintaining an audit trail for the data they produce. What we are hearing from more and more companies is that while they certainly like the idea of and recognise the need for HPC performance, it can be hard to achieve high productivity and efficiency on these systems. The main issue appears to be that in most engineering environments there are fewer compute and license resources than there are engineers, so engineers (often literally) have to queue up waiting for jobs to finish so they can use the license. Our scheduler eliminates this waiting and failed job risk by managing the queue automatically; prioritising jobs accordingly and elegantly restarting any solves that fail.

This begs a question: why give engineers powerful workstations and them have them sit around waiting for a simulation license to become free when you can centralise the simulation resource, making more efficient use of the engineers’ time, the license and the compute resource? IT should not be an inhibitor to innovation. That’s Dezineforce in a nutshell and a subject I’m sure will crop up regularly on these pages. Watch this space for future comment on HPC, simulation, engineering and the future of design.

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An engineer's best friend