Juan Yacht Design Taps HPC for Competitive Advantage in Manufacturing
Partnering with Europe’s PRACE, JYD creates faster racing sailboats
By Rob Johnson
When Juan Yacht Design (JYD) refers to “client victories,” the statement is hardly rhetorical. Based in Spain, JYD is among a handful of companies trusted by sailboat racing teams to deliver sleek, modern vessels capable of withstanding the rigors of world-class events. During grueling competitions like the Americas Cup and Volvo Ocean Race, fractions of a second can separate winning and losing teams.
To remain competitive in the sailboat-building industry, JYD must continually and doggedly pursue design refinements to maximize speed. A trial and error process requiring physical sailboat prototypes exposed to wind tunnel “tow tests” cannot serve as a viable test methodology due to the time and cost involved. Instead, computer simulations scrutinize every aspect of design for merits or detriments. While JYD has an onsite system with multiple cores at the ready, the cost of applications and the thousands of simulations needed makes their single-node system impractical for the resource-intense workloads.
Producing today’s cutting-edge sailboats requires the assistance of potent HPC systems. Factors like fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics, and structural analysis must be evaluated using detailed simulations. As the “engine” for each racing vessel, sail design proves extremely important too. Sheets must synergize with other design considerations to deliver the highest energy transfer. Even small tweaks to the sail shape and deployment process can shave valuable seconds in competitions.
Sailing ahead with PRACE and SHAPE HPC programs
A joint effort across 25 European member countries, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) makes available the HPC tools companies like JYD need. The government-sponsored PRACE initiative takes on the mission of supporting the academics, researchers, and businesses across Europe which require HPC systems for breakthrough discoveries.
Through the program, the European Union (EU) accurately anticipated many returns on their investment including economic stimulus from new job creation and additional tax revenue. Beyond financial benefits, the EU wanted to do all possible to foster unique scientific endeavors with potential for substantial public benefit. PRACE funding led to the development, maintenance, and expansion of highly advanced HPC systems like the Marconi system at Cineca in Italy achieving 20 petaFLOP performance, and the MareNostrum4 housed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) with 13.7 petaFLOP capability. Tapping the latest technologies like Intel Omni-Path Architecture and Intel Xeon Scalable processors, these systems reside among the fastest in the world. Current Top500.org rankings place Marconi at #14 globally, followed closely by MareNostrum ranking #16.
PRACE’s successes led to an offshoot endeavor, known as the SME HPC Adoption Program in Europe (SHAPE). SHAPE seeks to deliver benefits of its parent program. However, its focus lies squarely on helping innovative small-to-medium sized businesses which otherwise could not afford to access a highly advanced HPC system.
Those seeking access to PRACE systems must apply for the opportunity. A panel of experts at PRACE evaluates the applications received within deadline each year, then selects as many as their staff can accommodate. SHAPE prioritizes feasible proposals most likely to deliver the broader benefits at the core of PRACE’s mission.
For lucky applicants accepted into the program, access to both PRACE’s HPC experts and systems is free of charge. An SMB never faces risk beyond the time invested to work alongside SHAPE teammates. With many technical staff on hand, SHAPE experts partner with SMBs to understand the nuances of the business challenge, and the data needed to overcome it. After this initial phase, a SHAPE expert joins his or her client down the path of experiment design, code optimization, workload execution, and data interpretation to extract meaningful insights. Thanks to SHAPE professionals and advanced supercomputers, JYD’s significant challenges soon found solutions.
All hands on deck
To assist in JYD’s evaluation endeavor, BSC has code for multi-physics simulation, dubbed Alya. Combining Alya with the prowess of MareNostrum, SuperMUC, and other PRACE HPC systems enabled the possibility of comparing two industry-standard software tools used for wind flow analysis: Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS), and more resource-intensive Large Eddy Simulation (LES). By executing thousands of simulations, JYD could determine which tool offered more significant insights to translate into real-world sailboat structural improvements. Compute-heavy tests leveraging LES required all the computing power PRACE could muster. Early simulations focused purely on the evaluation of the mast and three sails. With those runs complete, the SHAPE team followed JYD’s suggestions for additional experiments taking a more holistic scenario including the boat hull.
Even with Europe’s most powerful HPC systems on hand for the sailboat design optimization — including over 100,000 hours on the MareNostrum system alone — the workload proved a substantial challenge. Average simulations using 1024 processors required two full days of runtime before much-anticipated results revealed their secrets. Comparing LES and RANS results, the experiments demonstrated LES’s 15% greater accuracy for prediction of turbulence-generated eddies across the sail. In turn, hidden revelations of vortices at the top and bottom of the sail’s edges presented opportunities to tweak the sheet design for improved energy transfer. Without an HPC system of MareNostrum’s caliber running LES, the RANS tests could not have revealed these nuances. Armed with data from the SHAPE partnership, JYD plans to implement design improvements to further the prowess of their racing craft.
Setting a course for victory with HPC
In today’s globally-competitive manufacturing industry, challenges of all sizes realize benefits from HPC technology. Whether an organization seeks to create a faster sailboat, a shatter-resistant shampoo bottle, or a safer vehicle, HPC can be the differentiator between companies that thrive and those that fall behind their competitors. SMBs in the EU should be sure to check out the SHAPE program and apply today for expert HPC assistance. How often does a small business with innovative ideas have access to profoundly-advantageous computing resources and expertise for free?
For more information about PRACE’s work with JYD, check out the whitepaper detailing their project.
Rob Johnson spent much of his professional career consulting for a Fortune 25 technology company. Currently, Rob owns Fine Tuning, LLC, a strategic marketing and communications consulting company based in Portland, Oregon. As a technology, audio, and gadget enthusiast his entire life, Rob also writes for TONEAudio Magazine, reviewing high-end home audio equipment.
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This article was produced as part of Intel’s HPC editorial program, with the goal of highlighting cutting-edge science, research and innovation driven by the HPC community through advanced technology. The publisher of the content has final editing rights and determines what articles are published.
