Fluid mechanics simulation is a critical tool for late-stage failure risk mitigation, as well as a driver of design insights throughout the product development process. Used across all levels of product design and validation, from design engineers seeking to understand fluid and thermal effects on a design proposal to analysts performing advanced aerodynamic modeling, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) serves a broad array of applications and a range of users with varied levels of expertise. The sometimes complex and computationally intensive nature of CFD necessitates careful consideration of the software and hardware investments required to produce accurate solutions and scale them at the speed of a company’s development process.

Dr. Bill Nitzberg, CTO, PBS Works at Altair, provides his perspective on the Future of HPC. HPC improves people’s lives – it’s the engine that accelerates solving complex science and engineering problems – making products more sustainable, making cars safer, making dangerous weather more predictable, even making medicines more effective. High Performance Computing has always been about leveraging lots of computing power to solve big problems...quickly. “Big” and “fast” define HPC, with the latest milestone, Exascale computers, capable of a billion billion calculations per second, expected to arrive next year. What is changing is what’s inside these engines of computing, how HPC is being consumed, and who is using HPC. HPC is becoming more and more heterogenous, with the addition of GPUs, vector engines, and high-performance versions of the Arm processors that run on today’s mobile phones, and, eventually, quantum processors. HPC is moving from “owning big, expensive iron” to a combination of buying and renting (via the Cloud). And, HPC is expanding beyond an “engineering experts only” discipline to a more mass-market audience, and also to a broader set of disciplines, especially those leveraging AI, machine learning, and data analytics. The recording is about 11 minutes long, and was presented at the 2020 Global Altair Technology conference.

Harnessing the computational capabilities of the graphics processing unit (GPU) is one of the cornerstones of Altair's mission to empower its customers. First and foremost, utilizing GPUs to accelerate numerical simulation delivers significant increases in speed and therefore, throughput. That means more opportunities to explore and fine-tune designs, faster decision-making based on more accurate results, and consequently the prospect of considerable reductions in time to market. In addition, creativity is enhanced, with more vivid, realistic and accurate rendering and visualization put within easier reach.

This presentation outlines Oracle’s vision for the future of artificial intelligence, including how AI and automation will drive the next wave of business transformation, the proliferation of technologies focused on understanding human language, intent, and context, like natural language processing (NLP), and how they are reshaping our interactions and businesses, as well as the critical role of high-performing, low-latency infrastructure in driving successful AI initiatives. This keynote by Clay Magouyrk, Vice President for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, was presented at the 2021 Altair HPC Summit, and is over 16 minutes long. View all HPC Summit 2021 Presentations