Simulations in this exascale era are important for many science and engineering problems. Whether it’s the numerical weather prediction, computational chemistry, seismic processing, or even the cooling of next generation silicon chips in a large data center; simulations provide important input for visualizing designs. Especially in the automotive industry, computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulations prior to the production process can provide valuable information about a crash and durability of a vehicle. This type of data can then deliver faster insights into how products will behave, providing crucial information (i.e. noise, vibration, and harshness) to how they will perform under real-world conditions. However, having the right infrastructure to streamline this process is vital. 

For those unfamiliar, CAE simulation deals with three-dimensional objects, but its function is much more than a visual depiction. Not only does it need to look like the” real thing,” but the CAE should be reliable in predicting various engineering variables. If you think of a wind tunnel or the air stream around a race car, CAE is crucial to assess the forces pushing the car and the drivability which aid in the development of its design and strategies. Therefore, CAE is much more than a vehicle’s outer appearance, it is an engineering analysis and simulation of the entire product. In the case of a crash test, a CAD design of components or a whole vehicle is analyzed and enhanced through the process of geometry and assumptions on the environment to predict results.

A good example is the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA), which are typically calculated through a time-consuming process of numerically solving mathematics and physics with computational software. The process of calculating these algorithms is usually compute and memory-intensive, which leads to longer development cycles that can be a deterrent to a company whose goal is to rapidly design and develop a product in which the overall design plays a critical role in efficient operation. With this time gap between design creation and design verification, one may ask if there is a way to streamline this process and reduce those hours of calculation and simulation into minutes. AI/HPC compute servers can aid in a revolutionary transition in simulation through the use of the latest silicon processors and accelerators. Not only can CAD and CAE evolve through the use of an efficient platform, but during the post-processing of an automotive design, fine-tuning and optimization can speed up the overall time-to-market.

QCT has specialized teams of experts and AI/HPC servers powered by Intel Xeon processors that can be optimized to support CFD and FEA simulations and modeling, serving as a workload-driven infrastructure for automotive design. Automotive corporations can let QCT assess the sizing and architecting of their CFD and FEA workloads to propose the best-fit system architecture based on QCT servers. Then, through QCT’s DevCloud environment, system tuning and benchmarking can be carried out using  industrial leading software ( i.e. ANSYS, OpenFOAM, Pam-Crash and STAR-CCM+) to calculate the vibration and fatigue of parts through the use of QCT servers and software environments. And when this is to be fully deployed, a team of QCT experts can aid in the entire process from cluster management to the rack building and cabling. As a result, companies get reassurance of the safety of its passengers without actually demolishing vehicles, and therefore gain a solution for CAE validation and optimization. 

Powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, QCT offers a full portfolio of servers that can be optimized for CAE tools:

• QuantaGrid D54X-1U – a general-purpose, rackmount, dual 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor server designed with a balanced architecture, built-in acceleration, and power efficiency. The D54X-1U offers twelve 2.5″ NVMe flash or sixteen E1.S NVMe flash drives, targeting HPC, AI, and enterprise workloads.

• QuantaGrid D54Q-2U – powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the D54Q-2U is QCT’s leading PCIe Gen 5 platform. It supports up to 400GbE of networking bandwidth, up to two dual-width accelerators for AI inference workloads, and is offered in air-cooled and liquid-cooled variants.

• QuantaGrid D54U-3U – an acceleration server designed for parallel computing. Supporting two 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with up to 350W and 32x DIMM slots, this 3U system features support for four dual width accelerator cards or up to eight single width accelerator cards to provide a comprehensive and flexible architecture that can be optimized for various AI/HPC/DL applications.

• QuantaGrid D74H-7U – an acceleration server purpose-built to tackle the most complex HPC and AI workloads. Powered by the latest 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor family, it supports 32 DDR5 DIMM slots and is optimized to accelerate massive data sets, huge AI models, and supercomputing applications.

As AI becomes increasingly coupled to engineering and manufacturing, empowering automotive engineers with optimized solutions across their development process from concept design to the final product is of the utmost importance. Therefore, QCT offers a full ecosystem of data center technologies to bring innovations to life through digital transformation.

For more information on QCT QuantaGrid servers supporting CAE or AI/HPC workloads contact: [email protected]