TROY, Mich.—Virtual crash tests are one of the most time-consuming tasks in automotive development processes. But a new analysis process recently implemented by Altair Engineering, Inc., is reported to “drastically reduce” the simulation time needed to perform virtual crash testing. Altair worked closely with Intel Corporation to achieve these results, using the latest Intel software tools and compilers to optimize communications schemes and extract the best performance with an Intel cluster based on Intel® micro architecture, code-named Nehalem.
Utilizing a new approach for simulating highly dynamic events, along with the scalability, quality, and repeatability of Altair’s crash solver RADIOSS, as well as Intel’s expertise in high-performance computing, a team of research engineers was able to run virtual crash tests in minutes instead of hours. For the first time ever, according to Altair, a frontal crash simulation of a vehicle model with more than one million elements was performed in less than five minutes.
“I am delighted to see this quantum leap in simulation performance,” said Djamal Midoun, Unibody safety manager for Ford Motor Company, in a statement. “In partnership with Altair, Ford has established a development process which consistently delivers vehicles with superior safety performance. RADIOSS is one of the cornerstones of this process, and these dramatic performance improvements will offer us a broad set of new opportunities. In the future, this will not only help us evaluate design variants faster than ever before, but also enable us to routinely perform design sensitivity and robustness analysis, which were incredibly time consuming before.”
The challenge for Intel software engineers was to maintain scalability with a high number of cores. They succeeded with a hybrid parallelism model implementation (MPI + OpenMP) of Altair’s new algorithm. This result has been achieved using an Intel cluster based on Intel Xeon processor 5560 series. Intel used the latest Intel software tools and compilers to optimize communication schemes and extract the best performance from the processor-based cluster.
“This breakthrough delivers the missing link for CAE-driven design in vehicle safety,” said Dr. Uwe Schramm, Altair’s chief technical officer for HyperWorks. “With the time compressing technology of HyperWorks, we had already reduced the manual tasks of model generation and assembly as well as report generation by more than a factor of 10. This combined with our new hybrid solver approach; we have eliminated the turn-around time bottleneck inherent to virtual crash testing. Now, multi-disciplinary optimization for crash, durability, and NVH will be able to provide valuable input to the design process.”
Altair Engineering (www.altair.com) is a global provider of simulation technology and engineering services.
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