Engineering Simulation HPC: CAD/CAE/CFD Integration

Why Does Engineering Simulation Require HPC?

The modern engineering design cycle demands numerical validation of dozens of different scenarios before a physical prototype is built. Modeling the crash behavior of a car chassis, simulating flow through the cooling channels of a gas turbine, or calculating the deformation of a bridge beam under seismic loads — each of these requires solving equation systems with millions of degrees of freedom. A single workstation can take hours or days under this computational load, while a properly sized HPC cluster completes the same task in minutes.

Beyond compute intensity, memory bandwidth is also a critical bottleneck. Large-scale Finite Element Method (FEM) analyses or high-resolution CFD simulations may need to keep terabytes of data in active memory. For this reason, engineering HPC infrastructure is a specialized domain requiring not just a high core count, but also a low-latency network fabric, fast parallel file systems, and appropriate license management.

Manufacturing, defense, energy, and construction companies in Turkey face increasing competitive pressure. Bringing products to market faster, reducing testing costs, and supporting regulatory certification with numerical evidence are no longer options — they are necessities. Mevasis responds to this need by offering KVKK-compliant HPC services at Turkey-located data centers.

Typical HPC Workloads in Engineering Simulation

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

CFD covers a wide application range, from aerodynamic optimization to HVAC design, pipeline analysis to combustion chamber modeling. Commonly used software includes:

• ANSYS Fluent / CFX — Enclosed flow problems and heat transfer analyses
• Siemens STAR-CCM+ — Automotive aerodynamics and cooling simulations
• OpenFOAM — Open-source CFD; parallel solvers that scale linearly at high core counts
• SU2 — Aerospace aerodynamics and optimized design studies

CFD jobs distributed across hundreds of cores via MPI are highly sensitive to cluster network latency. For this reason, InfiniBand HDR (200 Gb/s) or RoCE v2 network fabric is preferred on Mevasis CFD clusters.

Finite Element Analysis (FEA/FEM)

FEM solvers used in structural, thermal, and electromagnetic analyses solve large sparse matrix systems:

• ANSYS Mechanical — Static/dynamic structural analysis, fatigue, and fracture
• MSC Nastran / MD Nastran — Aerospace and defense certification calculations
• Abaqus — Nonlinear material behavior and contact problems
• LS-DYNA — Crash, blast, and impact simulations

Multiphysics and System Simulation

• ANSYS Multiphysics / System Coupling — FSI (fluid-structure interaction) analyses
• Simcenter Amesim — 1D system simulation, hydraulics, and powertrains
• GT-SUITE — Internal combustion engine thermodynamics and emissions modeling

Typical Sizing and Configuration

The table below shows the recommended minimum Mevasis HPC resources for different simulation scopes:

# Example Mevasis HPC Cluster Configuration — CFD Profile
cluster:
  scheduler: SLURM 23.x
  interconnect: InfiniBand HDR 200Gb/s (fat-tree topology)
  storage:
    type: Lustre 2.15
    capacity: 1 PB
    iops: 2M+ read / 1M+ write
  compute_nodes:
    - role: cpu_standard
      count: 32
      cpu: "AMD EPYC 9654 (96 cores)"
      ram: 384 GB DDR5
      local_scratch: 3.84 TB NVMe
    - role: cpu_highmem
      count: 8
      cpu: "AMD EPYC 9654 (96 cores)"
      ram: 1.5 TB DDR5
      local_scratch: 7.68 TB NVMe
  license_server:
    type: flexlm + hasplm (ANSYS, NASTRAN, LS-DYNA)
    location: on-cluster (low latency)

Engineering Simulation with Mevasis: Differentiating Factors

License Management and Cost Control

The licensing cost of commercial simulation software often exceeds hardware costs. Mevasis allows customers to run their own ANSYS, STAR-CCM+, or NASTRAN licenses on the cluster (Bring Your Own License — BYOL). License servers are placed in the same network segment as the cluster to minimize checkout latency. Alternatively, time-based HPC token packages are available for short-term project needs.

Pre/Post-Processing Integration

The simulation workflow is not limited to running the solver. CAD data preparation (ANSA, HyperMesh, SpaceClaim), mesh generation, and result visualization (EnSight, ParaView, FieldView) also consume compute resources. Mevasis offers both interactive GPU-based visualization nodes and batch post-processing options for these stages.

Data Security and KVKK Compliance

In defense, aerospace, and critical infrastructure projects, simulation data constitutes trade secret material. Mevasis data centers are located on Turkish soil; TLS 1.3 transfer encryption, segmented storage namespaces, and project-based access control lists (ACLs) are applied as standard. A KVKK data processing agreement (Article 12) is signed with all corporate customers.

Workflow Automation and CI/CD Integration

For recurring parametric studies, Mevasis provides SLURM job array configurations and Python/Bash-based orchestration templates. Integration with optimization tools such as ANSYS optiSLang or Dakota is also supported; hundreds of design variants can be automatically queued and evaluated.

Who Benefits?

• Automotive and Tier-1 Suppliers: Aerodynamic optimization, crash safety, cooling system CFD
• Defense and Aerospace: Structural certification calculations, ballistic analysis, aerothermal simulation
• Energy and Petrochemical: Pipeline flow modeling, reactor thermal analysis, turbine CFD
• Construction and Infrastructure: Bridge and building wind loading, nonlinear FEM under seismic loads
• Marine: Ship resistance CFD, propeller cavitation analysis, structural fatigue

Next Steps

For more information about Mevasis engineering simulation infrastructure, see the following resources:

• HPC Cluster Setup — Core architecture and installation guide
• Parallel Computing with MPI — OpenMPI and IntelMPI guide
• Parallel File Systems — Lustre vs. GPFS comparison

Fill out the contact form to discuss your project — our technical team will evaluate your workload and prepare a custom cluster sizing report for you.