Rising data volumes and shrinking product lifecycles are redefining the product development process for the Manufacturing and Engineering (M&E) industry. To survive and create a disruptive competitive advantage, manufacturers must develop high quality products and bring them to market in a fast, affordable, and repeatable fashion. The M&E industry has used high performance computing (HPC) tools for years to streamline and speed product design, but now they are also incorporating accelerated analytics into the process to accelerate their pace of innovation and drive measurable improvements to every area of the business.
HPC manufacturing technologies are empowering new levels of intelligent, data-driven product design and development. HPC allows designers and engineers to take advantage of tremendous levels of compute power and performance to model and simulate the complex physical properties and behavior of their latest product innovation – whether it’s a car, passenger jet, or the next popular smartphone.
High performance data analytics (HPDA) is defined as the use of HPC to analyze large datasets for patterns and insights. In the manufacturing industry, designers leverage the parallel processing capabilities offered by HPC to run powerful analytic software at high speeds, allowing them to quickly and accurately examine large data sets and draw conclusions about the information they contain. With HPDA as a precursor to Ai and deep learning, manufacturers can now put their troves of data to use by uncovering new patterns and insights in large datasets, and completely changing the way the business is run and products are developed.
These capabilities are helping manufacturers fast-track nearly every aspect of the product development cycle – from design concept to final validation – in a number of key ways:
- By enhancing the capabilities of computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) software, HPC allows designers to run larger and more complex simulations in a shorter amount of time, and explore multiple design iterations quickly and seamlessly.
- Engineers can model and test new designs with reliable results, enhancing the engineering decision-making process and speeding time-to-market.
- Designers can quickly identify and resolve defects during the design process, helping to improve overall product quality and customer satisfaction.
To capitalize on the capabilities offered by HPC, organizations are investing in robust server platforms that can turbo-charge HPC applications. Establishing a foundation of HPC tools within the infrastructure is the first key step to utilizing more accelerated analytics techniques – such as artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning – to improve manufacturing operations. They are also harnessing the power of dense GPUs within their servers to accelerate their most demanding HPC workloads, and deliver a seamless and highly immersive graphics experience for product engineers.
However, many manufacturers struggle to move beyond simply talking about using HPC and accelerated analytics and actually applying it to the extent that it becomes an integral part of their daily operations. There can be many infrastructure challenges standing in the way of next-generation data intelligence, including immature or sub-optimal infrastructure, lack of technical expertise and staff skills, and limited technology integration capabilities.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA have teamed up to provide the foundation, blueprint, and expertise to get started, scale, integrate, and optimize new technologies that will help manufacturers handle the challenges of tomorrow. As major innovators in the AI space, our two companies are custom-building computing platforms focused on redefining product development and business intelligence. We’re helping manufacturers rapidly develop new analytical models, realize business value from breakthrough deep learning systems, and enhance competitive advantage by leveraging the latest technologies to totally transform their way of doing business.
HPE and NVIDIA are demystifying disruptive new technologies like HPDA, deep learning, and AI. To learn more about how you can accelerate innovation with modeling and simulation insights powered by HPC, please be sure to follow me on Twitter at @VineethRam. You can also check out @HPE_HPC and @NvidiaAI.
