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How to increase Productivity in Engineering

: Speed up 3D simulation jobs with the use of NetApp ONTAP

Illustration with FSxN applied to CFD workload
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Jean Christophe Lamodiere
Jean-Christophe Lamodiere
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The digitalization of engineering is accelerating. To help automotive and manufacturing customers keep pace, NetApp offers support in various fields like engineering and smart manufacturing. For engineering projects, customers can deploy NetApp® intelligent data infrastructure to:

  • Reduce time to market.
  • Optimize costs.
  • Facilitate collaborative work.

These benefits apply to product lifecycle management (PLM; see the recent blog post Product lifecycle management in the public cloud), which is becoming more important with the growing use of 3D models and digital twins. They also apply to 3D simulation.

Simulation, a major axis of process virtualization

Indeed, simulation plays an increasingly important role in the reduction of development time. That’s why the expected investment trend for software and infrastructure over the next 5 years is very promising. According to various sources (Mordor Intelligence, MarketsandMarkets, Fortune Business Insights, see footnote), by 2030, the estimated annual growth rate will be about 12%, and there’s an even stronger trend in the cloud.

In the field of simulation, NetApp offers customers the ability to increase productivity by making file transfer time negligible when transferring 3D files between computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) workstations. In this context, increased productivity means that:

  • Experts can devote more time to their core business.
  • Tool licenses and high-performance computing (HPC) resources are used optimally.
  • Silos between the teams are broken down, and teamwork is optimized.

Data transfers accelerated by multiprotocol access and other ONTAP features that enable data mobility

Data transfers are faster thanks to the multiprotocol access (including NFS for Windows and SMB for Linux environments) that NetApp ONTAP® software provides, particularly on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. To prove it, NetApp and AWS conducted joint tests in 2024. Those tests consistently demonstrated reductions of more than 30% in the total duration of a typical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation process, and in the utilization of HPC resources in the cloud.

The following figure shows a typical scenario in a CAE lifecycle, including the bridge with the compute resources. FSx for ONTAP is an optimal tool for scratch storage in this type of simulation, as well as for the data lake that collects all input and output data of the compute job for simulation.

increase productivity engineering flow chart

All the details of these tests are explained in the AWS blog post The Business and Engineering Benefits of FSx for NetApp ONTAP for Product Engineering Workloads.

Although the AWS blog post was based on a hybrid cloud architecture powered by Scale-Out Computing on AWS (SOCA), the same methodology works seamlessly with AWS ParallelCluster and other HPC architectures. The following figure shows an overview of a high-level hybrid architecture powered by SOCA, using FSx for ONTAP.

Aws cloud flow diagram

Data continuity in engineering enabled by ONTAP and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

CAE is a major component of the development processes in engineering, and it must be connected to CAD and to massive data storage locations such as PLM systems and data lakes for engineering. The pursuit of high productivity requires the seamless data transfer that’s enabled by data continuity.

With ONTAP, the datasets don’t need to be copied everywhere, but they are accessible by everyone, whether NFS or SMB format. That data continuity comes from the use of NetApp SnapMirror® and Snapshot technologies, and from the cloning and global caching that ONTAP offers. Such easy data mobility can break down silos within an organization. Giving team members easy access to data is a fundamental prerequisite for implementing new projects in artificial intelligence (AI) that use machine learning (ML), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and generative AI (GenAI) such as generative design or AI-aided project management.

Accelerate your engineering and simulation projects to keep up with the pace of innovation. Find out how ONTAP Unified Storage Operating System | NetApp and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (Fully Managed Cloud File System - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP - AWS) can help you gain a competitive edge.

Special thanks to George Strother (NetApp Senior Cloud Solutions Architect), Patrice Raïpin Parvédy (AWS Global Strategist for Engineering), and Mickael Crozes (AWS Principal Solutions Architect) for their teamwork on this CAE topic.

Notes:

Simulation Software Market Size, Share | Global Report [2032]

Simulation Software Market Size & Trends, Growth Analysis, Industry Forecast [2030]

Simulation Software Market - Size, Companies & Analysis

Jean-Christophe Lamodiere

Jean-Christophe Lamodiere is the global vertical leader for the Automotive and Manufacturing industries at NetApp. He started as a Mechanical Design engineer. With over 20 years of experience in the Automotive industry in different countries at various technical and sales leadership positions with focus on Engineering, JC helps solve customer strategic challenges by leveraging the NetApp technology ecosystem for application purposes.

View all Posts by Jean-Christophe Lamodiere

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