Pinnacle Engines Achieves 80% Turnaround Time Reduction

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Background

Pinnacle Engines is a game-changing engine company developing and commercializing an ultra-efficient engine architecture. Pinnacle Engines uses Rescale to quickly run a wide variety of simulations, including the analysis of a four-stroke internal combustion engine using the computational dynamics (CFD) tool, CONVERGE by Convergent Science.

Customer Challenge

For Pinnacle Engines, designing an engine with 30-50% fuel efficiency requires many simulations, constant iterations, and the compute power to accomplish all this within project timelines. To meet strict deadlines while fully exploring the design space, Pinnacle Engines uses Rescale’s cloud simulation platform to run injector model characteristic studies, geometrical simplification studies, and reaction mechanism reductions, among others. Each of these analyses is used to design an ultra-efficient and powerful four-stroke engine.

Running tens to hundreds of models simultaneously requires extensive compute resources and access to a large pool of simulation software licenses–equating to large up-front costs and personnel investments. Even with a powerful internal processing cluster, the ability to run parallel jobs can be significantly limited.

“Running jobs on Rescale allows us to reduce capital expenses while still running the simulations needed to design industry-leading engines.
-Monty Cleeves, Pinnacle Engines CTO”

Benefits / Results Achieved

Using Rescale, Pinnacle Engines:

  • Ran 240+ simulations, revealing previously undiscovered design features
  • Reduced the time to results by 80% by running jobs in parallel with no wait time for hardware or software
  • Achieved greater than 73% cost savings compared to the use of additional internal resources
  • Ran jobs on an SOC 2 compliant infrastructure with industry-leading security features

Simulation Solution

Using Rescale, Pinnacle Engines is able to set up tens of jobs within minutes–customizing simulation resources for each job as follows:

  • Job-tailored compute resources are dynamically provisioned within five minutes of job submission
  • Run tens of jobs simultaneously without having to queue for software or hardware
  • Execute simulations whenever needed using both on-demand Rescale hardware and CONVERGE software
  • Gather results and deliver them to local servers for post-processing and analysis
  • Securely run proprietary simulation models with end-to-end data encryption on isolated, encrypted clusters

Summary

Rescale’s secure and intuitive cloud platform combined with on-demand CONVERGE CFD software enabled Pinnacle Engines to efficiently execute 240+ simulations and achieve faster results for improved engine design.