Aston Martin Redbull Racing brakes through the physically barrier’s of complexity with HPE and Citrix
Here is a great story about the innovation work that Aston Martin Redbull Racing have done with HPE and Citrix.
“By enabling our Aerodynamists to use a unified workspace to support the design processes, they now have the ability to work faster and produce more design iterations. This results in a more optimised design for each circuit and better results on track.”
Quote – Matt Sorrell, Principal Aerodynamicist, Aston Martin Redbull Racing
The Situation with CFD at AMRR:
Cumulative Distribution Function (CFD) process is complex, with hundreds of steps which cross between applications on Linux and Windows operating systems.
As CFD has evolved, the Aerodynamics Engineers at Aston Martin Redbull Racing required two workstations at their desks to run these two operating systems. They had to move their CFD workloads across these workstations in order to complete the CFD process and get the results they needed.
The input and outputs to CFD modelling are very graphically intensive and 3D. This means that the workstations required to run these workloads have to be extremely high powered with high-spec GPUs.
Solving the physically CFD complexity with HPE and Citrix:
The first step of this journey was to offer a Citrix Workspace for the engineering team at Aston Martin Redbull Racing – so users could avoid having two physical machines to execute the CFD process.
Aston Martin Redbull Racing implemented HPE SimpliVity 380 solution, which enabled them to have a high performance platform to deliver high end Virtualized Linux Workstations powered by Citrix
Aston Martin Redbull Racing are using Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops and more specific the Citrix Linux Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) with HDX 3D capabilities. Aerodynamics Engineers are now able to not only manipulate the process, but also the pre and post-processing of the CFD simulation in an interactive 3D environment. The pre-processing tasks (complex 3D geometry) and post-process analysis (video and complex 3D geometry) are now rendered and edited within the same Citrix Workspace solution, rather than using a separate physical machine.
The end users at Aston Martin Redbull Racing, can now drag and drop data between the two virtual desktops to support their CFD work flow’s. By running virtualized Windows and Linux workloads in a new Citrix Workspace solution all connected by the Citrix Workspace App at the end users at Aston Martin Redbull Racing.
Benefits Aston Martin Rebull Racing gets with the Joint solution from HPE and Citrix:
Aston Martin Redbull Racing are now deploying HPE SimpliVity 380 and Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops and specifically the Citrix Linux Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) with HDX 3D capabilities. Aston Martin Rebull Racing users, no longer need to switch between physical workstations all can be accomplished from the Citrix Workspace app.
Aston Martin Redbull Racing are gaining benefits of removing the physical workstations and KVM switches at the desk, these are now centralized in the datacenter and virtualized and the existing end user have Citrix Workspace App installed where they connect to the Citrix Workspace solution that have the two virtualized desktop with the CFD application.
Aston Martin Redbull Racing improved agility and performance using HPE SimpliVity hyperconvergence (HCI) solution. They users improved response to CFD data as workloads are run directly from the datacenters. IT management overall overheads are reduced. The end users improved the overall graphical visibility and rendering capabilities with the HPE Simplivity and Citrix solution. IT are able to snapshot, clone and backup / recover end user workloads from the virtualized machines with HPE and Citrix.
HPE and Citrix together for virtual machine management:
Aston Martin Redbull Racing are now gaining the benefits of having a joint solution from HPE SimpliVity and Citrix working together, which ensures that Aston Martin Redbull Racing have the most performant and usable virtualized workloads.
The IT department gains the benefits with virtual machine’s workload recovery is rapid and agile using HPE SimpliVity Backup.
Deduplication means Aston Martin Redbull Racing high end Linux Workloads with CFD use the HPE SimpliVity storage more efficiently, and they now reduce the costs by leveraging compute only nodes.
Aston Martin Redbull Racing gains flexibility as they can react quickly to requests for increased compute resources in the HPE SimpliVity virtualized environment powered by Citrix, so that no workload is limited, unlike the compute power of their physical workstation.
Source
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getdocument.aspx?docname=a00036279enw