In today’s competitive industrial environment, designers want to spend less time in data retrieving focusing more on value-added tasks thus reducing costs, time and improving product quality. Products are realized following a lifecycle made of phases and activities managed by many actors, inside the company and along the whole supply chain. In this scenario, critical aspects are the collaboration, the security of data. The study proposes a methodological framework and a technological architecture that enables the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) to support the Concurrent and Collaborative Engineering.
The solution allows users to perform remote design and simulation sessions, accessing engineering applications within a Cloud Workspace. Computational resources are provided by a HPC infrastructure able to balance the cluster load, allowing batch processes and interactive real-time sessions in the form of virtual machine with 3D rendering capabilities. Furthermore, the integration within the Product Lifecycle Management system ensure an improved use and management of information, through the aggregation of data coming from various processes.