Eight Ways Cloud HPC Is Helping Automotive Innovation

Perhaps no industry is embracing digital simulations more than automotive manufacturers. The competitiveness of the automotive industry requires rapid innovation and product development. At the same time, safety and regulatory requirements demand thorough testing on almost every part of a vehicle, from the tires and chassis to the steering wheel and the engine.

In a recent webinar “Hitting the Gas on Automotive Product Development with Cloud HPC,” experts from Rescale, AWS, and AMD provided key insights about how automotive manufacturers can improve and accelerate their product development processes with cloud-based high performance computing.

The cloud is boosting productivity and supporting advanced digital engineering techniques in the automotive industry in eight key ways.

The Unique Advantages of the Cloud for Digital Simulations

1. Massive Capacity: The virtually unlimited capacity of the cloud is eliminating the dreaded “queue.” This queue is the one that engineers and scientists traditionally have waited in to access limited on-premises supercomputing resources. 

Now, with the cloud and Rescale, engineers can click just a few buttons in our intuitive user interface and immediately access HPC cloud services from AWS and all the world’s top providers, powered by the latest chips from AMD, Nvidia, Intel and others.

2. Enormous Elasticity: The cloud’s pay-per-use model allows organizations to pay for what they use without the complications and cost of maintaining their own HPC data center. Organizations can scale up enormous clusters to run hundreds of thousands of tasks in parallel for high-throughput computing and design of experiments. Or immediately scale down their infrastructure when demand on compute resources is light.

3. Continuous Upgrades: Cloud providers are regularly standing up new HPC virtual infrastructures, powered by the most advanced chip architectures available. This is not possible with on-premises data centers, which need to amortize hardware investments over three to five years.

By having on-demand access to a wide variety of the latest chip types, organizations can always ensure excellent performance for a given workload. This then helps R&D teams get the best value out of their key simulation applications (such as for computational fluid dynamics). They can run these simulations magnitudes faster on the highest performance hardware, helping reduce usage time for R&D software.

4. Resilient Architecture: The cloud provides tremendous resilience and disaster recovery capabilities. This also applies to organizations with on-premises HPC operations. Hybrid or pure, cloud services ensure organizations will have redundant infrastructure available as needed to respond to business changes.

5. Global Scope: Cloud services from AWS and others are available around the world, organized by regional centers. With new SaaS platforms, global teams can access key HPC resources and collaborate easily across continents and time zones. And with the Rescale platform, all HPC resources and activities are centralized, making it simple for IT and HPC administrators to ensure R&D teams have the compute resources they need, when they need them.

6. Sustainability: AWS has shown that compared to average on-premises compute clusters, cloud data centers can operate 80 percent more efficiently. More cloud services are also moving towards renewable energy, connecting their customers into energy sources that few corporate data centers could access.

7. Economies of Scale: The enormous global scope of major cloud providers brings significant economies of scale by which the total cost of ownership of HPC infrastructure is much less, not to mention the opportunity costs of freeing IT and HPC teams to focus on more strategic efforts than continually maintaining supercomputing clusters.

8. Faster Product Development: The culmination of cloud benefits is in how it helps speed innovation. With state-of-the-art supercomputing clusters available on demand, organizations can run many more simulations in the same time, greatly speeding product development.

Teams can focus on their work rather than waiting for jobs to complete. They can quickly explore other design options or run additional tests to ensure compliance.

And on the cloud, organizations can set up multiple kinds of HPC infrastructures, ensuring the right kind of hardware is matched to the needs of each application and its compute task. Computational fluid dynamics simulations, for example, have much different computational needs than AI-driven generative design.

HPC for Leading Organizations

Organizations and innovators from across industries are reporting tremendous benefits from the cloud. Formula One teams, for example, have been able to speed up their engineering simulations by 80 percent while lowering cost 30 percent.

And with Rescale, cloud HPC is automated, centralized, and secure, helping your R&D teams focus on product innovation, not computing management.