Breakfast Bytes Blogs

This morning Cadence announced Fidelity CFD Software, a new generation of performance and accuracy in multiphysics simulation. I assume you already know this, but CFD stands for computational fluid dynamics.

Cadence acquired CFD company NUMECA and meshing company Pointwise last year. See my posts:

• Cadence to Acquire Computational Fluid Dynamics Company NUMECA
• Please Excuse the Mesh: CFD and Pointwise

Fidelity CFD is the first step toward integrating the technologies from the two companies, on top of a new infrastructure. The unified workflow eliminates data transfers between tools, providing both higher accuracy and faster time to results. Fidelity CFD is the first commercially available CFD software combining high-order numerics, scale-resolving turbulence techniques, and GPU/CPU acceleration.

Fidelity CFD addresses the most challenging requirements for CFD:

• Accurately and reliably predicts turbulent flows with significant regions of separation. Existing high-accuracy methodologies are too slow (a week or more) for today's short product development cycles, and existing fast solutions are too inaccurate
• Further reduce ground-based (wind-tunnel) or in-flight tests
• Advances in solver robustness and automation to enable multi-disciplinary simulations, with multiple physics applied to the same geometry
• Mesh generation process largely invisible to the user, which currently has limited automation and as a result takes up 80% of engineering time providing manual guidance, pre-processing cut from days to hours
• Operates efficiently on existing and emerging GPU-based high-performance computing (HPC) platforms

One new technology is a next-generation high-order solver and meshing technology, which provides higher accuracy than traditional methods with comparable runtimes, or the same accuracy but with much faster time to results. The technology scales very close to linearly as the number of cores increases, and runtimes can be dramatically reduced by the use of GPUs to handle the computation (see the graphs below).

Putting all this high-order numeric technology together allows scale-resolving turbulence simulation, taking advantage of the most advanced compute fabrics available.

But don't take my word for it. Here are a couple of automotive companies that you might have heard of! Honda and Toyota.

Honda used Fidelity CFD to streamline workflows to save weeks of processing time per engineer, while maintaining the highest quality of results. Dr Takiguchi, who is the Chief Engineer of Honda said:

We are very satisfied with the level of precision. We previously used various other commercial tools but were not satisfied by the quality. With Cadence, we divided our CPU time by three, while engineering time dropped to 30min/mesh.

Toyota used Fidelity CFD pre-processing for low-touch automated model preparation and reduced the lead time and work hours required by over 90%. They modeled both HVAC inside the car, and external aerodynamics. Antoine Delacroix, who is the manager for vehicle performance in Europe, explained:

We chose Autoseal and Hexpress to be our standard workflow for CFD preprocessing. They allowed us to reduce our total lead time and work hours respectively by 91% and 97% while consistently providing high-quality meshes with excellent layer coverage. Due to the high level of automation and standardization, creating a mesh from CAD does not require long pre-processing training. Since becoming part of Cadence, the team has continued to deliver valuable new solutions. We like the integration of all these tools in Fidelity CFD and look forward to continued innovations.”

However, it is not just automotive where Fidelity CFD is being used. It is also in aerospace, with market-leading customers such as Lockheed-Martin, NASA, and ArianeGroup.

And, perhaps the coolest of all, Fidelity CFD was used to design the winning hull for the America's Cup. See my post NUMECA, Computational Fluid Dynamics...and the America's Cup. As Joris Vanherzeele told me seeon after the acquisition:

We have been there for three or four Cups and always have come out on top. Last month was the 36th America’s Cup. It always goes into final standoff between defender and challenger. Emirates was the defender against Luna Rossa (Italian team). Heavy battle in the field, heavy battle. This time we came out on top again. One year it was Emirates vs Oracle, and both were using our tools so we knew we were going to "win".

Now that's a new angle on a competitive evaluation!

Learn More

The Computational Fluid Dynamics product page.

The Fidelity CFD product page.

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