Big data machine learning system for engineering simulation

Engineering simulation generates tremendous amounts of data - far more than most organisations can effectively leverage for future product designs. A typical integrated circuit, for example, has billions of variables that can be simulated. At the same time the specialised engineering supercomputing resources are not keeping pace with the demand for the higher fidelity simulations needed for increasingly complex products.

By leveraging such big data technologies as elastic compute and map reduce, SeaScape provides an infrastructure to address these issues in the context of almost any engineering design objective. These results provide more useful insight to product developers early in the design process so they can more quickly innovate their offerings. ANSYS has collaborated with Intel Corporation to optimise SeaScape to take advantage of the many-core Intel Xeon processor and Intel Xeon Phi processor families.

The first product on the SeaScape infrastructure, SeaHawk, helps to transform electronic product design through significant improvements in simulation coverage, turnaround times and analysis flexibility. The combination of big data techniques and ANSYS’ simulation capabilities equips SeaHawk users with a range of capabilities to reduce size of the chip and its power consumption without sacrificing performance or schedule constraints. Early users have realised an average of five percent reduction in die size, which could result in millions of dollars of savings during production.

“Die size and development time reduction are targets that electronic design engineers have pursued with marginal success given the limitations of today’s in-design solutions,” said John Lee, General Manager, ANSYS. “ANSYS SeaHawk bridges the in-design and sign-off needs by bringing unprecedented simulation performance and design insights without sacrificing sign-off accuracy and coverage. We’re excited to offer SeaHawk to the EDA industry today and equally excited to offer other SeaScape-based products across our entire simulation portfolio in the future.”

“The performance increases ANSYS SeaHawk delivers for engineering simulations enable users to freely optimise and innovate designs without constraints,” said Hugo Saleh, Director of Marketing, High Performance Computing Platform Group at Intel Corporation. “The collaboration between Intel and ANSYS continues to deliver innovation and performance for our respective customers, providing great value and performance for reduced time to results. Together with ANSYS we’re delivering leading simulation capabilities to market utilising the Intel Scalable System Framework.”