Real-time simulation of the air flow passing by a real bicycle

The NARL’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) announced its world-leading i-HPC (interactive high-performance computing) technology on June 18th, 2012 in the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’12) held in Hamburg, Germany. For the occasion, the NARL-NCHC showcased that interactive HPC (i-HPC) technology can be applied to the bicycle design.

The NARL-NCHC’s latest interactive HPC technology integrates self-developed computational fluid dynamics modeling, high performance graphics and augmented reality techniques, and boosts high performance simulation via graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. It enables a server-level computer to perform like a super computer with acceleration feature.

Varied air flows as a result of speed changes of the bicycle

The crucial part of interactive HPC technology is to maximize the hardware performance by precisely controlling separate functions of CPU (central processing unit) and GPU. Within this technology, GPU handles massively parallel signal processing for high performance computing and graphics, while CPU takes care of commands, data transmission and images processing. Enhanced by the self-developed computational fluid dynamics, a simulation that used to require a CPU to process for ten days could now be completed within six seconds that is about two thousand times faster.

To verify the practicability of i-HPC technology, the NARL-NCHC, in partnership with Taiwan’s high-end bicycle manufacturer, Velocite, has employed the technology in the design of low-drag bicycles. And using the augmented reality technique the interactive simulation effect could be visualized. The on-site audience could see the real-time 3D air flow passing by the bicycle in the simulation air flow field as well as every instant change of the simulation parameters.

Other than i-HPC technology, the next challenge for the new better-functioned bicycles is the optimized design. And ba

Using the Acer AT350 F2 server equipped with NVIDIA® Tesla® and Quadro® GPUs and the latest Intel Xeon processors E5 family, the NARL-NCHC and Acer demonstrated that real-time, interactive HPC applications are feasible within a single server node. Speaking on behalf of the NARL-NCHC at ISC’12, Dr. Matthew R. Smith, one of the NARL-NCHC team members, explained, “The advantage of augmented reality in the HPC space is its ability to interact in real time with a running HPC job. In the past, the job runs from beginning to end, and has to be modified before or after – not during the job. The latest innovative technology allows engineers to see what is happening immediately to speed up the design processes.”

Internationally, the high performance computing has been widely applied in medical science, health care, weather prediction, aerospace engineering, seismic data analysis, etc. As these sciences and technologies become more complex and sophisticated, the computing capacity needs to be significantly increased to keep up with the ever-increasing volume of acquired data. But by combining augmented reality with interactive high-performance computing, the research and development groups no longer need to rely exclusively on a large supercomputing cluster to test various design parameters and scenarios.

The NARL-NCHC as a pioneer in the world of innovative computing application and product design and development will continue to improve core technologies of high performance computing. Also it will partner with the government, academia and industrial sector to extend interactive HPC technology to other applications such as 3D interactive teaching, inundation forecasting, emergency response system, etc. for the wellbeing of the people and the prosperous development of the industry.