SBIR Phase I: Analysis and Acceleration of Engineering Simulation and Modeling

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I proposal will research, develop and demonstrate that the performance of Engineering Simulation and Modeling applications can be dramatically improved using FPGA and GPU accelerated servers. Engineering Simulation and Modeling applications enable the design and manufacture of complex mechanical systems that incorporate material modeling, heat transfer and fluid flow. There are significant financial, time and quality benefits derived from incorporating these multi-physics computer driven simulation methods into both the design and manufacturing processes. The Intellectual Merit in Phase I of the proposed project is to demonstrate that it is feasible to achieve 10 to 30 GFLOPS of sustained performance using FPGA and GPU accelerated servers to execute real-world Engineering Modeling and Simulation applications. As simulation models grow in detail, simulation times will become an inhibiting factor to the growth of this industry. The broader impact of this proposal will be realized through the acceleration of simulations by a factor of 10 times. If the proposed work is successful, a week-long simulation will become less than a day and the work will be performed with one accelerated server rather than a rack of computers. The success of this effort carries with it significant savings in time and the cost of infrastructure. Additionally, significant environmental savings will be achieved through reduced energy costs, thermal emissions and square footage.