ISC18’s Industrial Day Slate: Digital Twins, CFD for Automotive, HPC for SMEs 

For enterprise IT strategists, this year’s Industrial Day (Tuesday, June 26) at ISC18 in Frankfurt will cover a range of topics – digital twins, AI and machine learning in automotive design, HPC for SME’s and developments in advanced CFD among them – relevant to industrial companies seeking to learn about, or advance their knowledge of, utilization of HPC-class technologies.

Here’s an overview of the Industrial Day agenda, starting with three sessions focused on digital twin technologies, with links to the times and locations of the sessions:

Dr. Eng Lim Goh, VP/CTO for HPC and AI at HPE, at “Digital Twins and Artificial Intelligent” will discuss research in data intensive computing and analytics, inductive machine learning, deductive reasoning and AI – including “general intelligence” AI – and augmented reality. The session will include his work with NASA on an experiment aboard the International Space Station (see related story) to operate high performance computers for long duration space travel and in commercial satellites.

Jacques Duysens, systems product director for EMEA at CFD specialist Ansys, also will discuss “Towards the 2nd Generation of Digital Twins Mixing Simulation in Operations and AI,” a discussion of HPC technologies for detailed 3D simulations, multiphysics systems simulation and reduced order modeling techniques. The objective: real-time simulation-based digital twins for design and process optimization, operations optimization, predictive maintenance and training simulators.

Andreas Neuhold will discuss the practicalities of digital twin technology at GE, “1.2 Million GE Digital Twins and Counting… Real Uses Cases of Productivity Boost for Industrial Companies,” looking at predictive maintenance and equipment optimization, along with the use of AI to simulate equipment use scenarios, from aircraft engines to substations to elevators and gas turbines.

And, finally, Thomas Hahn, chief software expert at Siemens, will present on “Digital Twin and Smart Data – New Business Models in the Era of Digitalization,” a look at new opportunities in life cycle product management in manufacturing industries, with the goal of reducing time-to-market, enhanced flexibility, increased efficiency and better quality.

CFD in automotive design will be the focus of “Simulation and Validation of Water Management in Vehicle Development using High Performance Computing,” presented by Steffen Hagmann, a Ph.D. student at Porsche AG since 2015. He is responsible for developing new mesh-free CFD methods and he will focus on water management simulation for vehicles in various environments (in rain, on wet roads, in car washes).

Automotive aerodynamics CFD simulation will be the focus of “Using Mantium Flow as an Automation Tool for OpenFOAM” presented by Andre Zimmer at MantiumCAE, a consulting, software development and reseller of CAE products. He will discuss the use of CFD simulations to mange the complexities of new European emissions rules requiring automotive OEMs to announce vehicle emissions of their cars.

An overview of NCSA Industry, the private sector program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will be presented by Brendan McGinty, NCSA industry director, and Seid Koric, NCSA technical assistant director. NCSA has worked with more than a third of the Fortune 50 companies across a range of industries. The session will discuss computational milestones, including solving extreme-size multi-physics or geophysics problems on the petascale and potentially exascale level.

For small and medium sized businesses in Europe, Mark Parsons, director, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC),  will present “Driving Adoption of HPC by SMEs in Europe,” with a focus on the Fortissimo projects, the largest of the I4MS “Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs,” program, which has helped almost 100 manufacturing SMEs in Europe take first steps in HPC.

Finally, a round table discussion on usage of HPC resources by leading industrial players will close the day.