Engineering design consultancy Tecnica UK, which specialises in crankshafts, connecting rods and axle beam forgings, says that HPC (high performance computing) is reducing simulation times by 80%.
HPC system design, implementation, configuration and support was provided by HPC integrator OCF, and Tecnica says the result is typical 3D simulations down from 40 hours to just eight.
Mark Wren, simulation and design, Tecnica UK, says the company can also use its HPC system proportionately – for example, all 16 cores on a single large simulation, or performance from four cores on a first smaller simulation etc.
“3D simulation is now an essential part of the forge design process,” says Wren. “Simulation helps fivefold: to wean out any errors from our engineers – it validates their design work and gives us confidence in our forge die designs; it reduces the amount of physical testing we must undertake on design dies; it enables us to get our forging die designs correct first time; it optimises material use thus reducing wastage and it compacts time spent on the design phase of a product ensuring a quicker time to market.”
OCF’s HPC system design consists of an IBM System x3655 Server and IBM System x3455 Servers, both with AMD Opteron dual-core processors.
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