ACADEMIA

The current stresses of a weak global economy in many cases have reduced the specialized in-house engineering and rapid prototyping capabilities within many large companies. Subsequently, more so than ever, collaboration opportunities now exist between large companies and small, agile engineering companies like Swift. Along with these opportunities comes the increased need for Swift to provide next generation, innovative solutions in an expedient and rapid manner.

Earlier this year Swift Engineering received a new Cray CX1 deskside supercomputer and was the first customer to get Cray’s CX1000 rack-mounted supercomputer to further reduce its time-to-market with proven aerodynamic solutions with the aide of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in both aerospace and motorsports.

“Swift uses both physical wind tunnels and virtual modeling with CFD. Each of these methods has its advantages, depending on what you’re trying to do,” Mark Page, Swift’s Chief Scientist said. “We’ve been running CFD on a small cluster since 1997. We upgraded to a true HPC system earlier this year and increased our capability 10 to 100 times, depending on the problem. We aren’t just doing the same things faster; we’re doing way more things we haven’t had the ability to do before.”

At Swift Engineering, known for motorsports racing chassis, the company has leveraged over 25 years of racing car heritage and culture onto various aerospace prototypes, products and services working with traditional large prime contractors within the aerospace sector. The partnership results in rapid prototyping capability not found in much of aerospace industry, but commonplace in racing business, where concepts are turned into practice in matter of days and weeks, rather than in months and years.

It is the racing culture that makes Swift unique in aerospace industry along with its evolved CFD capabilities. Swift’s collaboration spans general aviation to UAV with prototypes and products like Eclipse Concept Jet (ECJ) airplane – which POPULAR SCIENCE awarded as one of the most technical innovations of the year, to the ‘KillerBee’ (KB) family of blended wing-body (BWB) UAVs and ‘Bat’ family of BWB.

Swift’s presentation will go on to address:

• Swift’s HPC requirements for evolution of CFD within the aerospace sector and motorsports industry
• Comparisons between Swift’s next generation CFD and its in-house wind tunnel testing
• Swift’s collaborations advancing the HPC industry
• Current and future Swift HPC user and system requirements

The HPC User Forum meeting is September 13-15, 2010, held at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle hosted by the International Data Corporation (IDC)