TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER

Reducing the Product Development Cycle by

Right-Sizing CAE
by Eric TSE, Systems Engineer and Dale Dunlap, Technical Consultant Platform Computing Corporation

Executive Summary
Technology has enabled industrial manufacturing to achieve innovations in product design that could not be
envisioned a decade ago. From optimizing turbo-machinery blades, which help make aircraft engines more
efficient and less noisy, to simulating explosions on oil rigs and predicting their effects, or simulating crash
testing of an entire vehicle, new technologies have continued to dramatically change the industry in recent
years.

Due to aggressive competition, more complex engineering technology, rising product complexity costs and
increased regulations, engineers are under tremendous pressure to produce new products better, faster and
cheaper. Engineers must also deal with newly developed materials, just-in-time manufacturing and more
advanced Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) software packages.

This paper explores the dynamics of today's product development cycle, highlights emerging trends and
challenges, and offers a unique approach to dramatically reducing the product development cycle - "the
Right-sizing Solution".
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 2

Emerging Trends in Industrial Manufacturing

SLASHING THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

Today’s industrial manufacturing design and development groups have cut turn-
around time in their production cycles significantly. Despite this accomplishment,
there still exists a wide array of competing forces that constrain the product
development cycle, including:

• Growing trends to cut engineering costs, while maintaining the highest

standards of quality

• Pressure to improve quality and reduce the number of failures in tests and
designs

• Increased engineering time devoted to testing in order to comply with

international environmental standards and government safety regulations.

• Rapidly changing product requirements as manufacturers keep pace with

their competition

Time pressures on the product development cycle also force manufacturers to

minimize the amount of physical testing performed on new products. Expensive,
time-consuming, and limited, physical testing simply cannot match the capacity
and sheer volume of computer simulations. While physical testing often provides
better results, it is not always practical. By using advanced computer simulations
and validating them against selective physical tests, engineers can perform more
analyses in less time. At the end of the day, optimization of the product
development process is what really matters.

STRIVING FOR OPTIMAL RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

The demand for optimal ROI is now a prevalent theme in Industrial
Manufacturing. Manufacturers that choose to optimize their developmental
process by moving to a distributed computing environment find that they can
save 100’s of millions of dollars and achieve ROIs exceeding 4,000%. Benefits
of the bottom line include lower capital and software expenditures. Top line
benefits include faster time-to-market, improved product quality and increased
customer satisfaction. Clearly, savvy engineering managers want to achieve the
highest ROI possible.

INCREASING SIMULATION & ANALYSIS TO IMPROVE PRODUCT

QUALITY
The continued trend toward improving product quality is best illustrated by the
growing popularity of the Six Sigma management philosophy in the industrial
manufacturing arena. Six Sigma strives to reduce the likelihood of defects or
failure in a product to less than one-in-a-million. In an age when a manufacturing
defect can cost manufacturers millions in recalled products and billions in
lawsuits, pressure to produce quality products is higher than ever.
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 3

In the past, engineers had to rely more on their “gut feelings”, coupled with years
of experience in testing, to formulate results. Technology has enabled them to
abandon this intuitive approach and adopt a more reliable computer-based
approach to solving engineering problems. These developments have led to a
tremendous demand for analysis software as engineers tackle endless
combinations of design variables to perform structural testing on products.

Computer technology has significantly impacted product design and

development, making it possible to do “virtual prototyping” of many new
products. Traditionally, stylists would sketch ideas for a new concept and then
pass their creations over to the CAD engineers, who then took those ideas and
built models on their drafting tables along with associated design criteria and
documentation. Next, CAE engineers took these blueprints and created physical
models of the designs to be run through a barrage of live tests to assess flaws,
structural defects, and accordance to manufacturing specifications. This process
was long and error-prone.

Now advanced software and hardware tools allow the entire process to flow
electronically from styling, to design, to analysis, to manufacturing, as well as
looping back to improve the process. The key to all of this is the electronic design
model that carries with it all the specifications and tolerances necessary to test
and ultimately, manufacture the product. Flowing design models through the
development process – with all the shared data – minimizes errors, speeds
development and improves quality. This workflow process allows global design
teams to collaborate around the clock on projects, sharing tools, workloads and
critical knowledge.

Computer simulations offer additional benefits that are impossible with traditional
techniques, such as just-in-time design modifications based on assembly
problems or sharing of structural and fluid dynamics results with strategic
partners who need to supply complete subsystems that operate flawlessly with a
new vehicle. With computational fluid dynamic experiments, comprising more
than a million elements – and growing – computers are the only solution. For
example, new safety, emission and alternative fuel regulations that must be
factored into new vehicle programs, electronic models which blend in advances
from the new computational science and research fields are the only way
manufacturers can comply and keep up.

DESIGN OPTIMIZATION
One of the current trends employed to manage the increased demand for new
designs, higher quality products and shorter design cycles are software tools that
assist engineers in Design Optimization. Although many software products are
available to help refine and further a specific class of designs through their full
design cycle, the art of finding the best design, all feasible designs, or a range
of designs, can be aided by a generalized Design Optimization package.

Several of these Design Optimization packages are specialized for the

mechanical - especially automotive - design sector. They offer the ability to
describe initial conditions, feasible ranges, objective functions and constraints.
With these tools, it is possible to automatically set up and execute multiple runs
of a simulator or solver. Sometimes such a process is run serially such as with hill-
climbing techniques or other optimizing search approaches. At other times
parallel searches for optimal or multiple solutions might employ Monte Carlo
Simulations, Design of Experiments, or Response Surface methods.
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 4

Design of Experiments (DOE) provides a highly structured way to study the effects
of multiple variables on product performance as well as efficient and effective
methods for determining the most significant factors and interactions in a given
design problem. A large portion of the cost of numerical optimization can be
avoided using Response Surface Models (RSM) to approximate costly analyses.

While such tools offer a way to stretch the existing supply of engineering talent,
ensuring that the design-space is optimized or that the best process is uncovered
more quickly, they can also place unprecedented demands on computing
resources. Whereas in the past there were a few tens of serial validation, test or
simulation executions, there are now hundreds of such executions needed, and
the fact that they are executed in parallel only creates a heightened need for
computational capability in order to meet time-to-market pressures.

ENHANCED PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS

Today's customer is demanding a growing number of enhanced product
requirements that require enormous design and testing. Today, a defense
contractor winning the design bid for a new fighter plane faces massive
computing challenges, including developing in-house parallelized code,
enormous compute resources and long-turnaround times, and design data that is
available by the CFD applications plus be accessible to the desktop systems of
the user community. On top of all this, the defense contractor faces increasing
pressure to improve the quality of new products, while at the same time cutting
engineering costs.

COLLABORATIVE DESIGN
In many companies, collaboration between product development engineers and
manufacturing engineers is a necessity. Receiving manufacturing feedback on
designs saves time in re-design, testing and analysis if a prototype cannot be
manufactured according to the design. Additionally, with the proliferation of
mergers over the past couple of years, the major industrial manufacturing design
centers have become more global than ever before. Design teams from different
companies can now collaborate on projects around the world – and around the
clock – sharing knowledge, tools and best practices. Workflow systems
coordinate the activities of stylists, designers, engineers and assemblers to share
data and specifications about new products.

Supply chain integration is another collaborative trend observed as major

industrial manufacturers strive to shorten their development cycles and deliver
higher quality vehicles at lower costs. Suppliers and subcontractors perform
complete design, simulation and testing of components that can be delivered just-
in-time to the manufacturing floor for assembly. For example, John Deere
demonstrated how a company can reduce cycle times and improve quality. John
Deere's Horicon Works developed a strategic partnership with its mower blade
supplier, providing best-practices and manufacturing knowledge to reduce costs
and improve quality of the supplier's product. As a result, the time to manufacture
blades was reduced from 15 days to two days.

Product Data Management (PDM) solutions allow manufacturers to manage and

support the entire product lifecycle, from concept and definition, to development
to product, to continuing support. Harley-Davidson engineers implemented a
PDM-enabled workflow system to improve the development process and cut both
the costs and time-to-market of their motorcycles.
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 5

With these emerging trends in the product development cycle, however, comes a
balancing act, how to speed your time-to-market and improve product quality.
This issue is one of the industry's most challenging. Do you trade 10 percent of
your CAE verification cycles to get a new product delivered weeks sooner – and
yet risk a recall later? Or do you instead extend your simulation and testing
process to assure that your new suspension system has been verified under all
conditions – only to lose market enthusiasm when a competitor launches their
product ahead of yours? These are the questions engineering professionals are
faced with each day as they strive to work better-faster-cheaper.

Emerging Trends in Industrial Manufacturing

The underlying thread that unites each of the emerging trends in the product
development cycle is the increasing use of computers in the product design and
engineering process. This is leading to increased recognition of the value of
computing resources to the overall organization. These include: earlier market
entry of products, improved quality, reduced manufacturing costs, earlier
correction of design or manufacturing flaws, more complex designs and better
positioning of products in the market. As companies extend their reliance on
technical computer systems, requirements for availability of computing power
increase.

The paradox of today’s CAE environment is that, although we are more

technologically advanced than ever, most engineers are still challenged to find
valuable compute resources to run this technology, or cannot manage the
enormous compute power they have effectively. This translates into lost
productivity for engineers and lost revenues for companies. With evolving
technology, comes the challenge of how to change work practices to get the most
benefits. This insatiable demand for computing resources is not without its
challenges.

Today, engineers often run jobs on specific systems in their data centers which
often become backlogged very quickly. A small analysis job, that should take
only a couple of hours to complete, can take days to be scheduled to run. In the
meantime, the engineer is not as productive as he/she could be. If the job fails,
the engineer has wasted valuable time and is in jeopardy of missing critical
deadlines. As a result, jobs take a long time to be processed and users do not
feel they get their fair share of computing resources. This leads to reduced quality
of service, lower productivity, inefficient use of scarce resources, and ultimately
reduces time-to-market and competitiveness.

Engineers can often find themselves competing with their colleagues for
computing resources and, when bottlenecks prevent them from accessing these
resources, their productivity suffers. Moreover, due to the backlog of jobs running
on central systems, most engineers cannot run as many simulations and analyses
as they would like, so product quality is often compromised.
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 6

In short, leveraging global design teams using the best software tools and
workflow systems, and outsourcing more responsibility to component suppliers is
becoming a very common strategy today. The downside to this approach is that
it requires an inordinate amount of administrative and management coordination
– not to mention IT investments – to ensure the best people have timely access to
available data and systems. This seldom happens, and engineers are
"handcuffed" by system bottlenecks, inadequate access to resources, and lengthy
delays. Furthermore, it places a significant responsibility on suppliers who may
not have the expertise or systems to handle extensive CAE activities on complete
subsystems.

The Right-sizing Solution

If there is a key objective for engineering departments, it is the capability to

dramatically boost the productivity levels of their engineers, as well as gain
enhanced levels of usage and control over their expensive intellectual assets.
This approach allows them to deliver higher quality products to the market
faster improving profitability and competitiveness. The following graph shows
the ideal scenario where the original design process is long with lower-than
acceptable product quality. Ideally, in the future, companies will reduce their
time-to-market and boost quality at the same time.

Figure 1: Pressure exists to reduce time-to-market and improve quality

Time to market Present Future

Quality

The role that computers play in the product development process is changing. Just
a few years ago, all design and development activities were centrally
coordinated and controlled – running on a few mainframe systems using
internally developed software applications. While this provided for centralized
administration, it was also inflexible and costly as it relied on an enormous
amount of hardware resources. With the falling costs and rising capabilities of
commercial hardware systems, combined with the advances in commercial
software applications, mechanical design companies are quickly moving to
distributed computing environments. The benefit of this transformation is that
desktop workstations are now capable of contributing to the collective computing
power of the organization, reducing the bottlenecks on supercomputers and
servers, and ultimately improving the quality of service to all users. Work can be
completed faster and more reliably. This trend towards distributed computing
enables manufacturers to dramatically improve product quality and speed their
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 7

time-to-market without incurring any of the downsides of reducred focus or

profitability. This is the process of “right-sizing” the CAE environment; being able
to run the right job on the right system at the right time.

Right-sizing is a way of taking advantage of all the under-utilized computing

power to fully leverage the organization’s computing power and maximize its
computing assets. Instead of having all the engineers waiting in line to access the
power of a few large systems, it is possible to create a “virtual” supercomputer
by harnessing the power of underutilized resources. By clustering a number of
computers together into a farm, smaller/parallel distributed jobs can be run on
them, saving the more compute-intensive jobs to be run on the supercomputers.

As illustrated in the figure below, right-sizing allows engineering teams to match

computing resource supply with end-user demand. A Noise-Vibration-Harshness
(NVH) simulation job might be more appropriately run on a central server, to
take advantage of a faster processor and more memory. A large Finite Element
Analysis (FEA) simulation job may require a high-end system to run on, or a
complex NASTRAN job might run better on a Cray system. By reserving high-end
compute resources for larger, more complex jobs and directing smaller, simpler
jobs to the cluster, compute resources will better distributed across the network.
The end result is faster turnaround time because each job is directed to the most
appropriate resource.

RIGHT-SIZING THE CAE PROCESS

By right-sizing the CAE environment, you are able to speed up your time-to-
market by accelerating the product development process. You can lower the cost
of product development, while at the same time improving product quality
through additional analysis, verification and testing.

Figure 2: Right-sizing the CAE process

WORKSTATIONS
(UNIX, NT, Linux)

Small CFD Parametric Parallel CFD

Simulation Modeling Job

DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING

NVH Simulation Job NASTRAN Debug Run Large Crash Simulation

SERVERS
(UNIX, NT, Linux)
Reducing the Product Development Cycle by Right-Sizing CAE 8

The methodology of right-sizing CAE provides the tools, techniques, and services
to solve the product development cycle challenges that today's engineering
teams are facing. Right-sizing compute resources significantly increases the CAE
capacity, ensures that CAE workload is directed to the most appropriate
computing resource, and provides engineering and other users with transparent
access to the most appropriate computing resources. As trends in today’s product
development cycle bring an increased demand for compute resources, the right-
sizing methodology can give engineering teams the capability to utilize every
CPU at their disposal.

The right-sizing process is a structural way to optimize the compute infrastructure

for CAE to enable new processes that lead to both a shortened product
development and improved quality. The following characteristics of CAE right-
sizing needs to be considered:

• Organize the computing infrastructure into easily managed, highly reliable

clusters

• Balance workload on high-end and commodity computing resources

• Harness idle CPU cycles on the desktops

• Schedule work based on Service Level Agreements and priority, while

ensuring fair share access to resources

• Optimize usage of costly software licenses on the compute infrastructure

• Provide the ability to manage complex design flows from beginning to end

• Link geographically dispersed locations to create a large virtual pool of

compute resources

Right-sizing CAE will change the way that engineers work, improving
productivity and access to resources like never before. When it comes to
delivering a shorter product development cycle, it is really about the productivity
– of people, processes, and systems – so you are better able to react to market
changes and beat your competition to the punch.

Authors' Bios:

ERIC TSE
Eric joined Platform Computing in 1998 as a Systems Engineer and has been
working with major automotive customers in the deployment of the right-sizing
CAE methodology.

DALE DUNLAP
Dale joined Platform Computing in August, 2000 as a Technical Consultant
specializing in the integration of Distributed Resource Management technology
to the automotive design & analysis environment.
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