Case Studies - the design and engineering sectors
The engineering and design sectors can benefit hugely from Grid and Cloud technologies. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the physical properties of designs, to test for strength and stress, to optimize designs for high performance – such as airflows around aircraft wings, rendering of designs is carried out to give photo-realistic images of designs. All these are extremely computationally intensive. However, once again, we see it is not the brute power that Grid can provide that makes it appealing: rather, more important are aspects such as scalability, robustness and, increasingly, on-demand provision. Moreover, the ability of Grids to enable collaborative design is being witnessed with increasing frequency. This collection of case studies of Grid and Cloud computing in the design and engineering sectors demonstrate these properties.
Company: Arts and Build, Mental Images
Business: Visualisation and Virtual Reality in Architecture
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: January 2010
The “Virtual Reality for Architects” application allows architects to upload a scene to be processed to a web site, configure a few settings, and have it rendered within minutes. Grid solutions and software have been used, customised and developed in order to achieve this. This is a huge step forward from the previous situation, where users would often have to wait overnight for their scenes to render.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
Grid4Architects: Grid computing in architectural rendering
Grid for Architects Case Study
Company: ICON
Business: Computer-aided engineering
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: January 2010
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is currently the fastest growing segment in Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) simulation. The adoption of the technology is continually increasing and users have a latent need for access to scalable, cost-effective CFD.
Grid offers itself as a unique opportunity where computing power, state-of-the-art software and human expertise can be found on demand. Grid computing is an alternative to using in-house hardware resources for performing CFD calculations.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
GridCAE: Grid computing in computational fluid dynamics
Grid Computer Aided Engineering (GridCAE) case study
Company: Magna Steyr Fahrzeugtechnik
Business: Automobile engineering
Grid Technology Provider: Sun
Date: April 2007
Magna Steyr Fahrzeugtechnik is a leading partner for automobile engineering and manufacturing based in Austria. The company wanted to develop virtual crash tests at low cost and required increased performance to calculate highly detailed models. The solution was the deployment of 170 AMD Opteron processors in 85 Sun servers with Sun Cluster managed with Sun N1 Grid Engine software. This resulted in tests being performed in days rather than weeks.
Grid computing case study provided by Sun
Grid computing at Magna Steyr Fahrzeugtechnik (Sun)
Also of interest is this earlier Grid computing case study provided by Platform Computing in May 2004:
Grid computing at Magna Steyr (Platform)
Company: Audi (Video Case)
Business: Car manufacturer
This video case study discusses how Grid computing is being used to link automobile manufacturing facilities across the world. Here Audi's Dr Widmann discusses the simulation techniques that can be tested quicker and at relatively very small cost through the application of Grid Computing.
Grid computing case study provided by: The Grid Stories
Company: FIUKA
Business: Automotive supplier
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
European’s automotive supplier industry faces constant pressure in the increasingly globalised market place. The demand for ever-more-complex products in shorter time scales, as well as cost-reductions during the production process, requires new technologies to compete in the market. SMEs in the automotive supplier industry cannot utilise these new technologies, because they cannot afford or operate such highly specialised hardware and software systems.
The Grid and portal solution INFORM developed within BEinGRID enables engineers anywhere in the world (with nothing more than a web browser) to access high-end simulation environments including computing power as well as human expertise and consulting from the sheet metal forming sector.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
Grid computing in Sheet metal forming
Company: NVIDIA Corporation
Business: Advanced graphics processing technology
Date: June 2005
Advanced graphics processing technology company, NVIDIA Corporation, was seeking 100% availability and cost-effective scalability for a busy EDA (engineering design automation) environment. The solution was a Grid architecture of 3,000 Linux compute nodes, supplemented by 13 Sun 6800s for large memory compute jobs, and a total of 42 NetApp primary and secondary storage systems with about 440TB of storage capacity.
Grid computing case study provided by NetApp
Grid Computing at NVIDIA Corporation
Company: LIKAT
Business: Chemical Engineering
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
Process industries are capital intensive and depend on innovative designs of products and processes, which are increasingly dependent upon computer aided experiments. These involve a large industrial sector comprising chemistry, materials design (specialty chemicals, design and structure of the materials) and pharmaceuticals. The path to new products and the economical use of in vitro experiments require computing tools that enable experiments with ideas and alternative products.
PIGridS (Process Industries integrated Grid Solution) offers a novel and innovative approach to systematise product and process development and the creation of patents and new products, while maintaining the competitiveness of the process industry. It is based on GridAD.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
Grid computing in new process development
Company: Sonac
Business: LSI circuit design
Grid Technology Provider: Sun
Date: December 2007
Sonac, a Japanese venture of Nitta Group’s Electronics Division, provides knowledge, services and solutions to speed the process of simulating and verifying LSI circuit designs. Seeking to increase the speed of LSI verification and simulation and increase product and service offerings, Sonac chose a Sun Grid implementation based on Solaris for x86 with Sun servers and Sun workstations, significantly reducing verification time from 17 hours to approximately 30 minutes.
Grid computing Case Study provided by Sun
Company: Mentor Graphics Corporation
Business: Electronic Design Automation
Grid Technology Provider: Sun
Date: January 2007
Mentor Graphics Corporation, a technology leader in electronic design automation (EDA), provides software and hardware design solutions that enable companies to develop electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. Hoping to accelerate time to market, improve product quality and better utilize existing heterogeneous computing resources including Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, AIX and Windows platforms, the company rolled out a Sun-powered grid for product development, serving hundreds of engineering users and performing more than 13 million jobs per month.
Grid computing case study provided by Sun
Grid computing at Mentor Graphics Corporation
Company: FSG
Business: Ship design and construction
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
Grid solutions have potential in the ship building sector due to the complexity and short duration of ship design, which can be as short as one or two months. Using the benefits of high performance computing resources on demand, the shipyards in this case study expect to shorten the design phase further while at the same time reducing uncertainty factors. As a result of the faster and more efficient design process, better ships can be built, cost can be reduced, expenses can be calculated more accurately and the chances of winning a contract in a very competitive industry are improved.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-Tude.com
Also see this article on the implementation appearing in Your Ship Building News, April 2009
Company: AMD
Business: Microprocessors
Grid Technology Provider: Sun
Date: September 2006
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) designs and produces innovative microprocessors for the computer, communications and consumer electronics industries. When they were looking for rapid access to millions of CPU hours of computing power without capital investment or lengthy procurement delays they turned to Grid computing. Despite having run its own high-performance computing (HPC) grid for more than a decade. To ensure the timely delivery to market of a new product line, AMD turned to the Sun Grid Utility at Sun's Network.com Web site to quickly access the additional compute power required for a simulation program, avoiding over 1 million dollars of capital investment.
Grid computing case study provided by Sun
Company: Synopsys
Business: Electronic Design Automation
Grid Technology Provider: Sun
Date: May 2006
Synopsys is a leader in providing electronic design automation (EDA) software, services, and intellectual property cores for the semiconductor and electronics industries. Setting out to maintain the highest possible utilization of the grid's resources at all times, Synopsys deployed the Sun N1 Grid Engine to quadruple key regression tests in one year and reduced testing time by 80 percent.
Grid computing case study provided by Sun
Company: Sommer Group
Business: Building engineering and construction
Grid Technology Provider: Fujitsu Siemens
Date: October 2006
When the Sommer Group looked to updating their IT architecture, they decided to opt for a Fujitsu Siemens’ Dynamic Data Center™ based on Oracle Grid technology. The company, who’s product range includes building fronts, glass roofs, doors and gates, made a significant reduction in operating and maintenance expense. What’s more, the investment is future-safe since the grid platform can be flexibly scaled with industry-standard technology.
Grid computing case study provided by Fujitsu Siemens
Grid computing at the Sommer Group
Company: Rolls Royce
Business: Auto engine Manufacturer
Date: April 2003
Aero engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce teams up with the White Rose Consortium to investigate the possibilities of using Grid computing’s potentially vast computational power to analyse real-time diagnostics on its engines – with the aim of detecting potential problems before they become one.
Grid computing case study provided by Computing.co.uk
Project: SmartLM
Business: developing a generic and flexible licensing virtualization technology
Date: August 2009
The EU-funded SmartLM project is developing a generic and flexible licensing virtualization technology based on standards, and integrating new service-oriented business models. One of the main goals, and the biggest challenge, for SmartLM is to balance customer needs and vendor requirements.
Grid computing case study provided by The 451 Group
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