The CAD Insider

Rescale Puts Analysis Toolbox On The Cloud

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO (CIC/NAFEMS 2104) - Rescale, a San Francisco startup, was on hand to demonstrate the power of the cloud to the assembled engineers and analysts at the first ever joint CIC/NAFEMS conference. Founded by ex-staffers of Boeing, one a structural engineer and the other computer scientist, Rescale has stocked the cloud with a multitude of applications --over 50 to date, including ANSYS, MSC Nastran and CD-adapco's STAR-CCM+,

Rescale offers over 50 CAE and math applications on the cloud
(from Rescale website)

Why would you want to use your favorite CAE application on the cloud, when you could just run it on your trusty workstation? I ask Ilea Graedel, who in her bizdev role at Rescale is paid to tolerate editors who show up at her booth without doing their homework. She is ready:

• You may not be near your computer
• You may need more horsepower than your computer can supply.

Free to Move About the Country

Rescale will let you run its applications from a web browser. You can be down the hall, in a meeting, on a flight...as long as you have a connection. You are now free to move about the country. Also, you don't have to blow the budget on over-the-top high performance computing (HPC) clusters. Rescale buys HPC chunks so you can use them as needed. With Rescale, a lone consultant can access computing power that was previously available to large organizations.

Rescale not only provides solvers, but also stores results data and employs data management tools to help sort through it.

Other services offer cloud based solutions (Gompute and Penguin) but they don't have nearly the wealth of CAE tools found on Rescale.

Analyst in Your iPad

Rescale can also be set up to solve frequently encountered problems, use its CAE tools to solve them, and present the answers. All of this, once again, can be run off the browser. Think of this as an analyst in an iPad.

The ideal Rescale scenario may go something like this:

• Old way: have had your salespeople gather requirements from a customer, submit them to your analysts, who would have crunched the numbers, and --day later-- given you or your design engineer results
• Rescale way: Salesman punches in the parameters on his mobile device, Rescale employs the CAE software on near supercomputers, and beams the answer in a few minutes.

Custom applications are created in Python code, and Rescale will provide some assistance.

Rescale, the name, has nothing to do with what the company does. It was chosen from among a list of available domains. It makes no sense, ut neither does Amazon or Google.

How Much?

Rescale charges $0.15 per hour per core, says Ilea. I have no idea what that mean in terms of 'typical' analysis. Ilea runs a small analysis on the spot, a parameteterized CFD problem that uses two cores. "That would have cost $1.50," she says.

This is stunning! I believe we have just accessed a CFD code, which you normally can't touch without parting with tens of thousands of dollars. We just used it for a couple of bucks. It feels like stealing.

Ilea has to bring me down to earth. The analysis we have run used OpenFoam, which is open source software, so no license fees were involved. Use of commercial code would pay more. There may be no such thing as a 'typical' analysis. "Customers spend anywhere from tens of dollars to thousands per job," says Ilea.

For More Information:

http://www.rescale.com/

Give Up Making CFD Meshes - Converge is Better and Faster

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO (CIC/NAFEMS 2104) - The mesh is critical to the speed and accuracy of a CFD analysis. Make too coarse of a mesh of your control volume and results near abrupt shape changes will not be accurate. Make too fine a mesh over the whole volume and the analysis will take forever. You could do a couple of runs to determine zones each corresponding to to different sizes of elements. Or you could get Converge to refine the mesh for you -- and I'll bet Converge will be faster.

Converge solves combustion problems with CFD using a mesh that refines itself on the fly
(picture from Convergent Science site)

It's so fast that it can solve rapidly changing volumes such as those occurring in combustion chambers of engines, where the dyamimic shape of the flame must be modeled and accounted for. If that's not impressive enough, it can calculate and adapt meshes in supersonic shock waves from jets.

Converge utilizes what it calls Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) to reduce the size of elements in critical areas. Because AMR is coupled with the solver, it refines the mesh during the analysis. You don't have to wait a couple hours to see problem in the results and rerun it. You set the level of refinement before the run. One level means the elements are reduced in length by a half, two levels and the elements are halved again, and so on.

On the Fly Mesh Refinement

You start with a coarse mesh:

Coase mesh to start... (picture from Convergent Science site)

Converge takes one look at your rather amateurish mesh and decides to start splitting up elements in areas that seem to need it, either around abrupt changes in geometry or where there is a large delta in your critical variable, in this case velocity of gas. The color changes indicate analyis has already begun.

Converge is already starting to refine the mesh in critical areas...(picture from Convergent Science site)

The control volume mesh will keep refining itself after successive runs until it reaches a preset limit. Here is a highly refined mesh after multiple runs. Note the relatively small size of elements in the narrow passage around the valve and a velocity profile suggests a more accurate solution.

Converge will keep refinining the mesh (picture from Convergent Science site)

Founded in Caterpillar

Converge had its beginnings in Caterpillar, where it was used by the construction vehicle maker to model the chemical reactions in their engines. Converge spun out of Caterpillar and can do general purpose CFD analysis, where there is non-reactive fluids and external volumes (example: flow over a wing section).

"AMR is most suited to transient solutions," says Rob Kaczmarek, Converge's director of sales and marketing, meaning the types of volumes that would change quickly. "We're seeing about 4 times faster than our competition in run time alone -- and that's not even including the time saved by not having to create a mesh!" He names ANSYS and CD-adapco as competitors. Rob claims Converge holds its own with most steady state problems.

Easy to Use Templates

You can set up Converge with templates so users who may not be savvy with CFD can answer a few questions and get results. Converge can be 'bought' as needed, for a project, for example. It will work on the Rescale platform, which does its calculations on HPC, so you don't even have to have a monster workstation.

Clearly, this is not your father's CFD.

For more information

Convergent Scienes website http://www.convergecfd.com/