Oracle cloud infrastructure for performance computing

By moving its performance and latency sensitive-engineering simulation workloads to Oracle Cloud, Nissan will be able to speed the design and testing of new cars. 

Specifically, Nissan uses software-based Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and structural simulation techniques to design and test cars for external aerodynamics and structural failures. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s compute, networking, and storage services optimised for HPC applications will allow Nissan to benefit from bare-metal HPC solution with RDMA networking as it innovates cars. Nissan anticipates higher performance and lowers costs with the ability to easily run their engineering simulation workloads in the cloud.

“Nissan is a leader in adopting cloud-based high performance computing for large scale workloads such as safety and CFD simulations,” said Bing Xu, General Manager, Engineering Systems Department, Nissan Motor. “We selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s HPC solutions to meet the challenges of increased simulation demand under constant cost savings pressure. I believe Oracle will bring significant ROI to Nissan.” 

Running large CFD and structural simulations requires tremendous amounts of compute power. Nissan has adopted a cloud-first strategy for its HPC platform to ensure its engineers always have the compute capacity needed to run their complex simulations. While the HPC market has been traditionally underserved by public cloud providers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers Intel Xeon based bare-metal compute infrastructure with RDMA cluster networking, offering latencies of under two microseconds and 100 Gbps bandwidth, enabling large scale HPC migrations to the cloud. 

Nissan is one of the first automotive OEMs to leverage GPU technology in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for structural simulation and remote visualisation. By using Oracle’s bare-metal GPU-accelerated hardware, Nissan reduces the cost and overhead of large data transfer, while ensuring that all the data generated by simulation jobs can easily be viewed in 3D OpenGL format in the cloud.

In addition to HPC workloads, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports a mature and diverse ISV application ecosystem across different domains such as CFD and structural simulation. This helps deliver a price/performance ratio that is more compelling than running on-premises or compared to other public cloud providers. Oracle’s cloud HPC solutions enable customers to run performance intensive HPC jobs on demand instead of having to buy fixed, on-premises capacity.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the company claims that Nissan can launch tens of thousands of cores and GPU-based high-end visualisation servers with tremendous flexibility, enabling them to dynamically change compute and remote 3D visualisation based on the needs of its engineers.

“Oracle is excited to work alongside Nissan to change digital product design and development, and help them build the next generation of award-winning vehicles,” said Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Our mission has always been to build the best cloud infrastructure for enterprises, including computationally intensive and extremely latency sensitive workloads that organisations like Nissan need to build the next generation of vehicles.”