High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart
One prominent player in this effort is Everllence, an international mechanical engineering firm based in Germany that has grown to more than 140 offices worldwide. Until recently called MAN Energy Solutions, Everllence has its roots in MAN, a global company that is also historically significant for building both the world’s first diesel engine and first diesel-fired power plant. In recent years, Everllence has turned its focus away from fossil fuels and toward developing technologies for large-scale decarbonization, including engines powered by alternative fuels, more efficient turbomachines, industrial scale heat pumps, and carbon capture and storage facilities.
“Our company’s mission is to forge the path toward net zero together with our customers,” explains Dieter Schwab, Head of Business IT at Everllence. “We manufacture technologies that could be transformational, and our ambition is to set the course for sustainable change with our product portfolio.”
Simulation with high-performance computing (HPC) is an essential tool for Everllence engineers working to achieve this goal. For the past four years this has meant integrating supercomputing resources at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) into the company’s product development pipeline. Working through HWW and T-Systems, which partner with HLRS to coordinate industrial access to its computing infrastructure, Everllence engineers around the world are using these high-performance computing resources to develop innovative technologies and customized solutions more efficiently.
Everllence is a leading provider of propulsion, decarbonization and efficiency solutions for shipping, the energy economy, and industry. Its machines are also typically both very large and very complex, making research and development impossible without simulation. When designing a next-generation engine for a supertanker cargo ship, for example, engineers must be able to simulate fluid dynamics behavior in the casting of steel components or combustion processes in the burning of alternative fuels such as ammonia or methanol. As a global leader in a very competitive marketplace, access to supercomputing capabilities is also extremely important for accelerating speed to market and achieving the extreme precision required to satisfy demanding specifications.
In most cases Everllence does not simply sell off-the-shelf products, but delivers customized solutions that are either unique or produced in small series that are designed to meet clients’ specific technical requirements. This means that simulation is required at many stages in the product design process, starting even during the proposal phase when Everllence bids for new contracts. Here, simulation can be used to evaluate the feasibility of a client’s technical requirements, and enables engineers to propose realistic solutions that will best meet those needs without the time and expense that would be required for physical prototyping.
In recent work, for instance, HLRS computing resources were used for acoustic simulations with fluid-structure interaction that wouldn't have been computationally feasible on previous in-house systems. In addition, the common web-based platform has greatly facilitated the collaboration with other off-shore simulation engineering sites.
Before the company began computing with HLRS, simulation engineers at Everllence would face bottlenecks resulting from limited computing capabilities, leading to competition for scarce resources within the company. Large simulations also often exceeded the practical capacity of the company’s in-house systems. Such factors meant needing to wait to run a critical simulation or to purchase computing time elsewhere. Overcoming these limitations is very important, as the ability to simulate quickly and efficiently directly affects Everllence’s ability to complete project proposals and push product development forward quickly.
Meanwhile, exploding demand for high-performance hardware like GPUs and data storage devices presents a supply chain problem for companies like Everllence. Because hardware manufacturers are already struggling to keep up with demand from large-scale data centers and HPC facilities, companies whose primary business is not information technology can find it difficult to purchase hardware of their own. “The prices for hardware are constantly fluctuating,” Schwab says, “and in the past one might have to wait up to a year for components to be delivered after placing an order. These dependencies are painful, and it doesn’t make sense for us to invest in them.”
Gaining access to HPC resources at HLRS solved both of these problems, as simulation engineers now have the ability to access powerful, state-of-the-art computing resources for large simulations on an as-needed basis. For Dr. Martin Kaiser, Product Owner for Simulation Process Integration and HPC at the company’s Oberhausen location, this has major benefits: “In our work it is sometimes necessary to scale up to resources on the order of 1,000 compute cores. Because of the large overhead required to purchase and operate a supercomputer, however, it doesn’t make sense for us to have our own dedicated system. Through our partnership with HLRS, we have virtually unlimited, pay-per-use access to powerful high-performance computing capabilities exactly when we need them.”
Reliable access to a large-scale HPC system through a partnership with HLRS has also had other benefits for Everllence. Kaiser explained that having a single, primary resource for high-performance computing is enabling the company to standardize its simulation pipelines. In the past, individual groups working at different locations used a variety of legacy solutions. Access to HLRS’s system has made it possible to implement a more standardized approach in which shared solutions based on common use cases are now used across the entire company. This has streamlined collaboration and creates new synergies that can further enhance productivity.
While the technologies that Everllence produces have enormous potential to support decarbonization, the company’s global prominence and its direct engagement with megatrends mean that the future is anything but certain. Factors such as changing national commitments to carbon neutrality targets, political decisions that affect demand for heat pumps, new regulations in the shipbuilding industry, or conflicts in the Middle East that disrupt the fuel industry have significant effects on demand for Everllence’s green technology products and services. Such insecurities also highlight why on-demand access to HLRS’s systems is so important for Everllence, as it gives the company flexibility it needs to adapt quickly to changing market dynamics.
Despite such volatility, Schwab finds great motivation in what Everllence has to offer: “The need for electric vehicles is widely discussed, but even if it were possible to shift the entire passenger car market to EV’s, the effect would not be nearly as large as it would be, for example, if we can make the cement industry or district heating CO2-neutral. The potential is much, much greater.” For that to occur, though, research and development will need to continue in order to make carbon capture and storage practical across the world, on an industrial scale. Making progress toward that goal will mean that HPC systems like those at HLRS will be continue to be critical.
— Christopher Williams
Funding for HLRS's supercomputers was provided by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Science, Research, and the Arts and the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
A member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, HLRS is one of three German national centers for high-performance computing.
