HPC from A-Z (part 22) - V

V is for… virtual prototyping

While virtual prototyping may sound like complicated process, it’s actually just a form of product development that uses Computer Aided Design or Engineering to develop a virtual prototype before putting a physical object into production. In other words, it’s about building big expensive stuff like spaceships, race cars, and battleships.

Organizations like NASA aren’t just going to experiment with billions of dollars in the hope that the resulting rocket successfully launches. When you’re investing that much money, you want a guarantee that your product is 99.9% likely to work as it should and the people using it are going to come out in one piece! It’s in the design and test phase of building these products that HPC plays a crucial role.

In the last blog post we talked about developing fictional worlds for computer games. HPC helps to easily produce a realistic virtual environment for testing manufacturing designs in a very similar way. And no company better understands how important this is than engine manufacturer, MTU Aero Engines. They use Platform LSF to prioritize jobs so that time sensitive tests can be completed quickly and make use of maximum possible computing power to create a realistic test environment. In fact, the technology is so popular that they keep coming back for more and the organization has had to create a special queue that allows users to submit low priority, short duration jobs to test for immediate problems before submitting for thorough testing.