Rescale Case Study: Bombardier Aerospace

Recently, we completed a Rescale project with an aerodynamicist at Bombardier Aerospace. With more than 35,500 employees and a leadership position in global markets, Bombardier Aerospace designs, manufactures and supports innovative aviation products for the business, commercial, specialized, and amphibious aircraft markets.
This project was conducted to demonstrate that industrial-scale simulation in the cloud is not only viable, but also represents the best choice for both large and small companies regarding most engineering and scientific applications. Rescale worked on this project in conjunction with the HPC Experiment organized by Ubercloud. We used open-source data and open-source simulation tools exclusively.
This project involved setup and simulation of unsteady airflow around aircraft landing gear. Rescale provided the browser-based simulation platform used for set up and submission of the job, as well as the computing capacity demanded by customers, on the order of thousands of computing cores. The software code of choice was Gerris, and the required model files were sourced from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
As is typical for Rescale projects, the customer first uploaded the model files securely to Rescale using our proprietary file transfer manager. Rescale’s developers then helped set up the first trial run, including selecting software, hardware, and job settings – a process taking less than 5 minutes for most jobs.

vorticity-plot
Visualization of vorticity around aircraft landing gear 25% through simulation illustrating the Gerris built-in grid refinement

Rescale is also capable of providing real-time visualization of analysis results. The vorticity plot shown above was displayed directly on the user’s web browser through the Rescale platform.
Thanks to Rescale, the engineer was able to procure all the computing capacity needed for this job in seconds, and simultaneously run analyses over a period of days. The final analysis took more than 10 days (240 hours) to converge, used 16 cores (as requested by the customer), and required 200GB of RAM memory. To maximize Gerris’s performance, the entire simulation ran using “in-core” memory, requiring an industry-leading 15GB per compute core. Upon completion of the analysis, the engineer downloaded 60GB of results file data for further post-processing on his local desktop.
When asked about his overall experience using Rescale, the customer said “Rescale was very responsive when it came to installing and getting Gerris running on their system. The web interface is intuitive and offers enough commodities to monitor complex CFD jobs on the fly (via log file tailing and flow visualization snapshots displayed by the software). From my perspective, this is a very effective solution for engineers doing large CFD, FEA, and other such analyses.”
We believe the main benefit to end users is Rescale’s ability to provide vastly different aspects of running successful industrial-grade simulations easily through any web browser, including (a) access to simulation software codes, (b) high-performance computing (HPC) hardware, and (c) actual engineering and CAE expertise. The Rescale team comprises engineers and computer scientists with deep domain expertise, which we leverage to meet all customer demands promptly and effectively.
To learn more about doing your own projects with Rescale, contact us at info@rescale.com.

Author

  • Mulyanto Poort

    VP of HPC Mulyanto is responsible for application engineering at Rescale. Before joining Rescale, Mulyanto spent seven years as a software development and mechanical engineer at Mid-Michigan Research, LLC where he performed specialized research consulting for major engine manufacturing and automotive supplier companies. Mulyanto previously held a position as Research Specialist at Michigan State University, focusing on the development of custom data and image analysis tools. Mulyanto holds a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University.

Similar Posts