A perspective of HPCN requirements in the European Aerospace Industry
Abstract Product complexity is increasing rapidly to address the demanding requirements driven by customers, regulations and safety. More complex designs and an increasing number of design options must be evaluated whilst controlling the cost and length of the design cycle. The engineering requirements come from different disciplines, such as aerodynamics, structures and electromagnetics. The division of engineering into separate disciplines is not recognised by nature, with the result that addressing requirements within one discipline can compromise requirements in other disciplines. Product complexity is now such that requirements from multiple engineering disciplines need to be simultaneously addressed at an early stage of the design cycle to avoid costly re-design. These problems have placed strong demands on computational design, driving key trends in numerically intensive modelling, as well as the requirement for more computational resource. The requirement for more computational resource arises in many disciplines and is compounded by the need for multi-disciplinary design. This results from the increased product complexity which has to be matched by increasing the mathematical complexity of the model providing the underlying framework for the computational design tools. The availability of increased computational resource via parallel platforms at affordable prices enables these problems to be addressed facilitating • • computational analyses of more complex problems • • simultaneous computational analyses of multiple design and planning options • • multi-disciplinary analyses, i.e. simultaneously address requirements in different disciplines. The continual growth in computational design and computational resource provides the potential for the end-user engineer to carry out far more design more rapidly and accurately. However this potential can only be exploited if the end-user can efficiently define more complex problems, multiple problems, multiisciplinary problems and also analyse the large volume of results. Consequently considerable effort needs to be placed on the user environment, encompassing problem set-up and results analysis. This paper expands on these requirements within the aerospace and related sectors with examples of applications from specific disciplines. Some emphasis is attached to the growing supercomputer disciplines, computational electromagnetics in particular. Some key features of parallel processing are discussed including • • the high degree of parallelism required to get a modest percentage of peak performance • • exploitation of parallel platforms without Teraflop performance • • the potential benefits of hybrid or heterogeneous platforms compared to homogeneous platforms. These are key issues affecting the exploitation of parallel platforms and the success of parallel processing in simulation and design in general. The presentation includes examples on colour viewfoils that are not included in the paper.