Oracle BrandVoice: GPU Chips Are Poised To Rewrite (Again) What's Possible In Cloud Computing

At Altair, chief technology officer Sam Mahalingam is heads-down testing the company's newest software for designing cars, buildings, windmills, and other complex systems. The engineering and design software company, whose customers include BMW, Daimler, Airbus, and General Electric, is developing software that combines computer models of wind and fluid flows with machine design in the same process--so an engineer could design a turbine blade while simultaneously seeing its draft's effect on neighboring mills in a wind farm. What Altair needs for a job as hard as this, though, is a particular kind of computing power, provided by graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Silicon Valley's Nvidia and others. "When solving complex design challenges like the interaction between wind structures in windmills, GPUs help expedite computing so faster business decisions can be made," Mahalingam says. An aerodynamics simulation performed with Altair ultraFluidX on the Altair CX-1 concept design, modeled in Altair Inspire Studio. Altair, which offers its computational fluid dynamics software on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and other cloud computing services, is testing new GPU capabilities to improve how its software solves the complex physics problems that simulate a car's behavior in a wind tunnel, see how windmills' turbulence affect each another, or understand wind flows around skyscrapers long before construction begins.