“Launch, Leave & Forget” – A Personal Journey of an IT Manager into Numerical Simulation HPC and how PADT is taking Compute Servers & Workstations to the Next Level

Launch, Leave & Forget was a phrase that was first introduced in the 1960’s. Basically the US Government was developing missiles that when fired would no longer be needed to be guided or watched by the pilot. The fighter pilot was directing the missile mostly by line of sight and calculated guesswork off to a target in the distance. The pilot often would be shot down or would break away too early from guiding the launch vehicle. Hoping and guess work is not something we strive for when lives are at stake.

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.

At PADT I continue to look and search for new ways to Launch, Leave & Forget. One passion of mine is computers. I first started using a computer when I was nine years old. I was programming in BASIC creating complex little FOR NEXT statements before I was in seventh grade. Let’s fast forward… so I arrived at PADT in 2005. I was amazed at the small company I had arrived at, creativity and innovation was bouncing off the ceiling at this company. I had never seen anything like it! Humbled on more than one occasion as most of the ANSYS CFD analysts knew as much about computers as I did! No, not the menial IT tasks like networking, domain user creation, backups. What the PADT CFD/FEA Analysts communicated sometimes loudly was that their computers were slow! Humbled again I would retort but you have the fastest machine in the building. How could it be slow?! Your machine here is faster than our webserver in fact this was going to be our new web server. In 2005 then at a stalemate we would walk away both wondering why they solve was so slow! Over the years I would observe numerous issues. I remember spending hours using this ANSYS numerical simulation software. It was new to me and it was complicated! I would often knock on an Analysts door and ask if they had a couple minutes to show me how to run a simulation. Some of the programs I would have to ask two or three times, ANSYS FEA, ANSYS CFX, FLUENT on and on. Often using a round robin approach because I didn’t want to inconvenience the ANSYS Analysts. Probably some early morning around 3am the various ANSYS programs and the hardware, it all clicked with me. I was off and running ANSYS benchmarks on my own! Freedom!! Now I could experiment with the hardware configs. Armed with the ANSYS Fluent, and ANSYS FEA benchmark suites I wanted to make the numerical simulations run as fast or faster than they ever imagined possible! I wanted to please these ANSYS guys, why because I had never met anyone like these guys. I wanted to give them the power they deserved.

“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.

What is this a joke? Nope, Most IT groups operate like this. Many are under staffed andin constant fix it mode. Most say and think like this. “I would appreciate it if you sat in my chair for one day. My phone constantly rings, so I don’t pick it up or I let it go to voicemail (until the voicemail box files up). Email constantly swoops in so it goes to junk mail. Seminar invites and meet and greets keep coming in – nope won’t go. Ultimately I know you are going to try to sell me something”.

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…