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High Performance Simulation

An essential technology for competitiveness and innovation
 

A revolution is taking place which will radically transform industry and research in very many fields. The combination of the digital simulation and high performance calculation now makes it possible to develop products and services or to realize research without passing by the traditional processes of experimentation. So we can develop planes, cars, drugs in less time and at a lower cost, and treat social challenges unimaginable up to now.

HPC became a fundamental tool for the competitiveness and the innovation’s capacity of our manufacturing or services companies as well as our research laboratories.

These technologies concern all industrial and service sectors, scientific and technological, as well as the great social stakes. Some significant examples are illustrating this point :

 The decreasing, even removal of the material prototypes to the profit of virtual prototypes in aeronautics or car manufacturing, is reducing cost and time while increasing quality and innovation

 Design of new innovative offers in the main leading sectors of the industry of services (Finance, Transport, Telecommunications, Multimedia,….)

 Control of technologies in the energy sector, in particular in the nuclear field and ITER program

 Environmental issues and the control of the natural and industrial risks requiring considerable calculations, with the example of the climatic change or risks of tsunamis.

 Healthcare for the design of new molecules and the development of analysis instruments such as the medical imagery.

Whatever the fields of application are, to meet the considerable increase in the quantity of numerical information available and with the increasing complexity of the systems to be conceived, the control of technologies of modeling and high performance simulation became one of the keys of success.

It is a major issue for the users, but also for industries of technology, an extremely competitive sector but with a strong potential of economic development, job and value creation

 
Here are some examples of high performance simulation
 
Aerodynamic and streamlining simulation

The digital simulation of Dassault Aviation's Falcon 7X was carried out with the CEA's Tera 10. This calculation represents 200,000 hours of calculations effected in only 200 hours thanks to 1,000 parallel processors.

The space surrounding the plane was discretized in a gridding comprising 115 million elements. 7 physical values (pressure, speeds, temperature, kinetic energy, ...) were calculated in each grid unit for each step of elapsed time which meant solving 140 million equations for the whole calculation.


© Dassault

Cancerology

Positon Emission Tomography (PET), which is increasingly used in hospitals, is an examination involving medical imagery generating data which still remain exceedingly complex to interpret. In order to optimize this analysis and to extract the most relevant, significant and tell-tale physiological information, researchers work on numerical simulation programmes which currently come up against the limits and constraints of calculation and processing time.

The CEA-SHFJ (Frédéric Joliot Hospital Department) has, therefore, installed the GATE simulation platform which enables them to modelize PET examinations on the Tera 10 supercalculator located in the Bruyères-le-Châtel CEA centre. Simulation has made it possible to reproduce and replicate in a highly realistic fashion the distribution of a tracer used in PET in cancerology diagnostics. These initial simulated findings hold out the promise of optimizing PET data processing in the medium term and subsequently personalizing for each individual patient the acquisition protocols of these examinations.



© CEA

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