Despite some holdouts, most simulation providers have woken up and smelled the graphics cards.Once the domain of specialists with high-powered computers, computer aided engineering (CAE) is becoming a workstation application for designers. Are computational fluid dynamic (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA) and other simulation programs taking advantage of GPU acceleration?

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) sought to find out and earlier this year conducted interviews with leading CAE software vendors such as Altair, Ansys, Dassault Systèmes, Hexagon and Siemens Digital Industries Software. The firm also worked with Nvidia to understand how the industry is changing in response to GPU acceleration now available in many CAE applications and workflows. The results of those interviews are available in an eBook titled Accelerating and Advancing CAE.

The transition has not been a quick one. GPUs were introduced at the end of 1999 in response to high demand from enthusiastic gamers who were fervently embracing 3D gaming. The first GPUs were expressly designed for games and game developers could simply write to the GPU’s built-in functions. As application programming interfaces (APIs) evolved, those functions multiplied exponentially. The effect was immediate; the number of games written for GPUs increased rapidly, games ran faster, and they got more beautiful.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the same transformation was on the way for engineering and scientific calculations, but a lot had to happen before the design industry was ready. All the software had been built for CPUs, and customers were used to depending on the power of their systems’ CPUs to run complex, resource heavy simulation and analysis software. They were also used to analysis software being complex and taking a very long time to run.

Everything Goes Faster

As the pace of innovation accelerates, each successive generation of GPU gets new features that are useful for CAE including hardware accelerated matrix math and artificial intelligence (AI), faster memory, and higher bandwidths. Also, software tools for programming GPUs are proliferating. Introduced in 2007, Nvidia’s CUDA enabled the development of specialized libraries for uses across the computing universe. AMD has also been working on open software approaches, and so has Intel which is introducing new high-powered GPUs to complement its CPUs.

In our interviews with the CAE companies, we were told that GPUs are outperforming CPUs by many multiples depending on the specific tasks, but in spite of this obvious advantage, we were also told that some engineers worry that GPU-accelerated applications might have to pay for the speed boost with accuracy. That has not proved to be the case. Instead, developers and their customers are finding the results from GPU-accelerated calculations to be as accurate as those performed on CPU-based solvers.

GPU acceleration is enabling workstations to do the jobs that were previously performed by high performance computer (HPC) machines. As a result, performing those jobs can be less expensive in terms of energy use and financial costs. The ability to perform more iterations, less expensively and more sustainably is enabling more designers to take advantage of simulation earlier in the design process and to have confidence in the results.

Industries do not transition overnight, and the CAE industry is a particularly good example. Some of the products are based on very old code originally written for CPUs in the 1960s and ‘70s. How these companies take advantage of GPUs may vary. The companies we interviewed told us that they’re in the early stages of working with GPUs for CAE. They’ve been aware of the benefits of GPUs for a long time, but they’re even more aware of the pitfalls of moving too fast. Developers have to consider the installed hardware base at their customer sites and what kind of problems they are trying to solve.

Since their introduction, GPUs have been evolving to support all digital industries. They have gotten more transistors, larger memory, faster bandwidths. New types of accelerator cores such as Nvidia’s CUDA Cores and AMD’s Stream Processors have been developed, and Tensor Cores have been added to accelerate AI and machine learning (ML) applications. Real-time ray tracing cores have been introduced and a plethora of developer software tools and libraries have been developed. The net result is the GPU has leapt ahead of the CPU in reducing the time needed to process simulation meshes, as characterized in the graph below.

As the core count increases, the time to compute decreases, and when properly employed the GPU provides astonishing acceleration.

Some of the independent software vendors (ISVs) are sticking with CPUs, but some of the newer companies and new programs are all on GPU. The most sensible approach in our opinion is a hybrid approach that lets the user employ whatever GPU capabilities they have.

There are several clear takeaways from this project, but first and foremost is that the use of GPU acceleration in established CAE products is increasing. We’re also seeing the development of new products written from the ground up to take advantage of GPUs. Sustainability has become an important consideration for developers and customers. And finally, CAE has the potential to become a more integrated part of the design process, which leads to better designs and more sustainable products.

JPR’s eBook, Accelerating and Advancing CAE is available at GraphicSpeak.com.