July 2013 Summaries

Rescale and Dassault Systèmes have partnered to enable users of the SIMULIA Abaqus Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software to conduct simulations on Rescale's cloud-based platform, providing an intuitive, web-accessible service that integrates seamlessly with Abaqus. This collaboration allows engineers to leverage high-performance computing resources with robust security measures, enhancing their ability to manage and analyze data confidently. Rescale CEO Joris Poort expressed enthusiasm about expanding their partnership with Dassault Systèmes, highlighting the potential for Abaqus users to maximize the capabilities of their software through cloud-based engineering analyses. Dennis Corain from Dassault Systèmes noted that this partnership addresses customer demands for efficient cloud solutions in running complex simulations, marking a significant benefit for users of SIMULIA Abaqus.

Gromacs, funded by the European Research Council and developed by ScalaLife, is an open-source tool designed for the analysis of molecular dynamics in biochemical molecules, and it is particularly useful for parallelizing computational tasks across multiple cores to reduce runtime. The text uses a phospholipid membrane simulation as an example to demonstrate how parallelization can significantly cut down on computation time, although the improvement is not always linear due to factors like job decomposition, message passing, and load imbalance. Gromacs offers a time-accounting tool that helps users track these inefficiencies and improve their parallelization strategies by analyzing CPU time through log files. Despite these challenges, advanced users can leverage the insights from Gromacs to enhance their computational efficiency when dealing with large-scale molecular simulations.

Gerris is an open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software developed by Dr. Stéphane Popinet at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), initially designed for modeling complex wind patterns but has found applications in diverse areas such as spacecraft re-entry dynamics and fuel injections. The software has been added to Rescale's library to support customer needs, and a demonstration involving a CFD analysis of 2D viscous flow around a heated cylinder was conducted to showcase its capabilities. This simulation visualizes the formation of a Bénard–von Kármán vortex street and examines how varying the cylinder's diameter affects turbulence, with findings indicating less uniform vortex patterns with larger diameters. Gerris offers a range of tutorials and examples online for new users, further supporting its accessibility and application versatility, while Rescale invites users to explore its broader efforts in the HPC cloud space.