Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation

Background and challenges

For over 25 years, ICON has been a globally trusted partner for simulation-driven product engineering to world leading OEMs, emerging disruptors and suppliers.  ICON’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) products and expert services support engineering analysis for a wide range of applications in the Automotive, Aerospace, Buildings, Health, Energy, Motorsport, Consumer Products and Space industries among others.

Within the last 10 years, there has been a transition to the use of more widely available public cloud environments on demand. With ICON’s cloud-based engineering platform (called iconCFD® Platform), ICON wanted to offer users access to state-of-the-art simulation technologies and make the set up, running and evaluation of the results of a simulation as simple as possible using a local browser that can access remote High Performance Computing (HPC) environments.

For example, an engineer might have to run Digital Engineering Experiments (a so called “DoE”s) with 1000s of short simulations which only take a few computer cores and then a smaller number of simulations taking 2 days on 1000s of computer cores.

Morphemic helps in meeting this challenge of dynamically diverse demand.   Morphemic helps iconCFD® Platform to obtain the resources proactively to minimize cost, and optimize the cost-to-simulation-time ratio based on end-user constraints, depending on individual Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the number and type of simulations requested.

The computing resources are optimized on the fly dynamically based on the current load and projected simulation loads.

The outcomes of the Morphemic project are key to ensuring that unlike in the past, where the product engineers had to wait for computing resources, they can now define the time to obtain a solution in advance. This is important for product development in that an engineer or designer can accurately plan and develop their products to pre-determined timeframes.

To summarize the project, MORPHEMIC will influence product engineering & development by enabling:

  • Better – Dynamic exploitation of multiple cloud environments in public and private modes
  • Faster – Product engineering in quantifiable timeframes
  • Cheaper – Digital engineering by optimal utilization of the mostcost-effective cloud infrastructures
    And finally,
  • Easier – Deployment of multiple clouds in both public and private environments