Offloading solver jobs to cloud appliances to preserve local computing resources for critical tasks

About the customer

Fabric8Labs is revolutionizing manufacturing with its proprietary electrochemical additive manufacturing (ECAM) technology. ECAM is a key enabler across multiple value chains, including electronics, communications systems and semiconductor manufacturing. Partnering with customers to provide metal additive manufacturing services, Fabric8Labs enables the production of high-performance electronic components at scale. To support this, their engineers utilize high-performance computing (HPC) via Altair One™ to run large solver jobs that simulate complex systems and interactions.

Their challenge

Fabric8Labs uses innovative metal 3D printing techniques to create advanced products for the thermal management and wireless communications (radio frequency (RF) component markets. The team relies on advanced tools to optimize component designs for their customers’ chip power maps, simulate high-resolution antenna elements and customize product designs to reduce size, weight and power needs of the components.

Our solution

To expand its computing resources, Fabric8Labs worked with TrueInsight, a Siemens Digital Industries Software expert partner, to implement the Altair One cloud innovation gateway. Altair One is built on a powerful HPC backbone that gives users easy access, optimizes workload management and efficiently scales computing resources to the cloud. Users can manage complex workflows, visualize data with user-friendly dashboards and drive engineering advancements from anywhere in a safe, accessible environment that does not require specialized information technology (IT) skills.

Using Altair One gave the Fabric8Labs team instant access to powerful computing resources in the cloud, where they used Google Cloud credits to create bring-your-own-cloud appliances in Altair One and run large solver jobs, including Simcenter™ Acusolve™ software jobs with between 8 million and 150 million elements. With Altair One the Fabric8Labs team more than tripled their throughput on models/iterations per day.

Fabric8Labs utilizes high-performance computing via Altair One to run large solver jobs that simulate complex systems and interactions.

Results

With expert support from TrueInsight and Siemens, Fabric8Labs quickly adopted the Altair One intuitive interface, enabling users to leverage HPC with minimal effort. The Altair One gateway’s built-in workload manager – part of the HPCWorks™ software HPC and cloud platform – simplifies queuing and eliminates the need for manual job tracking.

Altair One, Simcenter and HPCWorks are part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

By offloading solver jobs to cloud appliances, the team preserved local computing resources for critical tasks like meshing and model setup. This efficiency allows Fabric8Labs to deliver solutions to customers faster.

“By leveraging Altair One, our customers benefit from significantly faster turnaround times, receiving results much sooner and enabling quicker design decisions,” says Douglas de Aquino Castro, senior thermal engineer at Fabric8Labs.