So I say all of that to say this. As it relates to virtual prototyping, Launch, Leave & Forget for numerical simulation is something that I have been striving for at PADT, Inc.
Striving internally and for our 1,800 unique customers that really need our help. We are passionate and desire to empower our customers to become comfortable, feel free to be creative and able to step back and let it go! Many of us have a unique and rewarding opportunity to work with customers from the point of design/or even the first to pick up the phone call. Onward to virtual prototyping, product development, Rapid Manufacturing and lastly on to something you can bring into the physical world. A physical prototype that has already gone through 5000 numerical simulations. Unlike the engineers in the 1960’s who would maybe get one, two or three shots at a working prototype. I think it is amazing that a company could go through 5000 different prototypes before finally introducing one into the real world.
“What is the secret sauce or recipe for creating an effective numerical simulation?”
This is a comment that I would hear often. It could be on a conference call with a new customer or internally from our own ANSYS CFD Analysts and/or ANSYS FEA Analysts. “David, all I really care about is When I click ‘Calculate Run’ within ANSYS when is going to complete.” Or “how can we make this solver run faster?”
The secret sauce recipe? Have we signed an NDA yet? Just kidding. I have had the unique opportunity to not just observe ANSYS but other CFD/FEA code running on compute hardware. Learning better ways of optimizing hardware and software. Here is a fairly typical situation of how a typical process for architecting hardware for use with ANSYS software goes.
Getting Involved Early
When the sales guys let me I am often involved at the very beginning of a qualifying lead opportunity. My favorite time to talk to a customer is when a new customer calls me directly at the office.
Nothing but the facts sir!
I have years’ worth of benchmarking data. Do your users have any benchmarking data? Quickly have them run one of the ANSYS standard benchmarks. Just one benchmark can reveal to you a wealth of information about their current IT infrastructure.
Get your IT team onboard early!
This is a huge challenge! In general here are a few roadblocks that smart IT people have in place:
IT MANAGER RULES 101
1) No! talking to sales people
2) No! talking to sales people on the phone
3) No! talking to sales people via email
4) No! talking to sales people at seminars
5) If your boss emails or calls and says “please talk to this sales person @vulture & hawk”. Wait about a week. Then if the boss emails back and says “did you talk to this salesperson yet?” Pick up the phone and call sales rep @vulture & hawk.
Who have they been talking to? Do they even know what ANSYS is? I have been humbled over the years when it comes to hardware. I seriously believed the fastest web server at that moment in time would make a fast numerical simulation server.
If I can get on the phone with another IT Manager 90% of the time the walls come down and we can talk our own language. What do they say to me? Well I have had IT Managers and Directors tell me they would never buy a compute cluster or compute workstation from me. “Oh well our policy states that only buy from big boy pants Computer, Inc., mom & pop shop #343,” or the best one was ‘the owner’s nephew. He builds computers on the side.”. They stand behind their walls of policy and circumstance. But, at the end of the calls they are normally asking us to send a quote to them.
So, now what?
Well, do you really know your software? Have you spent hours running different hardware configurations of the same workstation? Observing the read/writes of an eight drive 600GB SAS3 15k RPM 12Gbps RAID 0 configuration. Is 3 drives for the OS and 5 drives for the Solving array the best configuration for the hardware and software? Huh? What’s that?? Oh boy…