Manufacturing Industry
 To head off competition, companies need to innovate faster whilst always decreasing costs. High performance computing is crucial for rapidly designing, developing and testing tomorrow’s products and services. And today, Bull makes HPC accessible also to SMEs or to departments of larger companies who want to have local HPC resources.
Bull provides wholly integrated HPC systems (servers, storage, cluster management and data management) that can handle a wide range of commercial and in-house applications in a production environment – and leave users free to focus on engineering, not on cluster administration or data management.
Why Bull for Manufacturing Industry
A proven track record of designing and deploying High Performance Computing systems for numerous industrial companies
Bull has implemented many HPC infrastructures of various sizes for renowned companies from the automotive, aerospace, energy and metallurgy sectors in France, Italy and Austria. Our industrial customers rely on the performance and reliability of their Bull HPC systems to design, improve, stream-line, evaluate, crash-test… their products.
Industrial customers can also benefit from the expertise of ServiWare, a leader in HPC solutions integration acquired by Bull. ServiWare has an extensive experience in the automotive, aerospace and energy markets in France, with a wide range of services adapted to the needs of each customer.
Collaborations with ISVs to guarantee performance and support
Bull works closely with the major software vendors to ensure that their application portfolios are available on Bull NovaScale platforms. In-depth technical collaboration ensures that the applications – your applications – deliver optimum performance on our systems, and guarantees effective and comprehensive support.
A large portfolio of supported applications
CAE and CFD applications are for the most part very complex codes which have evolved from years of development on many architectures. In order to achieve optimal results, it is important to work closely with the ISVs, not only on the port, but also on the fine tuning and integration of the application in the cluster environment. MPI libraries careful choice and parameterization as an example has a direct influence on the scalability of the application on a high-performance interconnect like InfiniBand. Bull’s application engineers have done this work and are for this purpose in permanent cooperation with the development and validation teams from ESI, Radioss/Altair, Fluent/Ansys, Abaqus/Simulia, LSTC… For those ISVs which offer standard benchmarks, these have been run with excellent scalability results and published on their respective vendor’s website.
Bull customers are successfully running a wide range of simulation applications on their Bull systems:
Structural Mechanics: Abaqus (Simulia), MSC (Nastran) and Ansys
Fluid dynamics: Ansys (Fluent), CD Adapco (STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+), AVL Fire
Crash: ESI (PAM-CRASH), ALTAIR (Radioss), LSTC (LS-Dyna)
All these applications have been ported to the Bull Advanced Server (BAS) for Xeon software suite and extensively tuned to the Bull NovaScale servers and clusters architecture. Scalability of these applications, in particular, was taken into account and reaches the highest levels on Bull’s hardware.
As early as 2005, prestigious customers like Pininfarina have started using these applications on their installed Bull NovaScale clusters, and have been very satisfied with the overall results. Other customers like Dassault Aviation or ONERA have also used internal codes (in the CFD field per example) or public domain applications (ELSA, CEDRE, …) on NovaScale clusters with excellent performance.
The expertise of the Bull HPC Competence Centre at your disposal – in Europe
Capitalizing on our experience on pioneering projects, Bull’s HPC Competence Centre is established as a leading facility in Europe. Our HPC specialists provide expert-to-expert support as part of customer projects. And the proximity of our HPC Competence Centre, located in the French Alps, greatly facilitates exchanges with European customers.
Bull’s HPC benchmarking team has high-level expertise in optimizing user applications. They have helped many industry customers obtain maximum performance from their systems.
Bull partners with leading research consortia to develop advanced HPC technologies
Bull’s experts are playing an active role in many European cooperative research projects that prepare the intensive computing technologies of tomorrow. Since many HPC departments of large industrial companies are represented in these projects, Bull R&D finds here a major opportunity to collaborate with HPC users from the automotive, aerospace, energy and other sectors, on both software and hardware issues. To make sure that Bull systems and software environment are up to the expectations of industrial users.
Some examples of cooperative projects that are of special interest to various industries:
Application projects: NUMASIS (seismic), TELEDOS (health), PARMA (manufacturing, embedded), POPS (pharmaceutical, automotive, financial applications, multi-physical simulations…)
Tools: application parallelizing, debugging (PARA, POPS, PARMA)
Some of Bull's references in the Manufacturing Industry
Pininfarina, Italy
AVL, Austria
Alenia Aeronautica, Italy
Alcan, France
Dassault Aviation, France
Renault, France
Images courtesy of Distène and AVL |
