Fast structural analysis by Fraunhofer IGD and RISTRA
RISTRA has been developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, Darmstadt, Germany. As Fraunhofer being an applied research organisation, as a service we offer adaptation of our software to meet new requirements and customer-specific workflows.
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Simulated Model of an engine bracket (Photo: Business Wire)
Structural analysis is one of the most frequently used simulation domains in industry when designing parts of different kinds of products being it vehicles, buildings, household appliances, etc. Speeding up the simulation and optimization loop can contribute to finding better solutions in shorter time, thus reducing time to market.
RISTRA (Rapid Interactive Structural Analysis) is a software library which can be integrated into existing CAD/CAE packages to deliver new levels of performance within such applications. Benchmarking RISTRA against commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) CPU-based alternatives has shown performance benefits of up to a factor of 100x (two orders of magnitude); comparisons with COTS GPU-based systems of up to 30x. These results have been achieved under the constraint to not deviate from the reference solutions by more than 1%. Embedding RISTRA into optimization scenarios with many reoccurring simulations can save hours of computation time as demonstrated in a scenario for topology optimization together with Honda Research.
RISTRA’s speed is achieved by fully leveraging the massive parallelism of GPUs by implementing the whole finite element method completely on GPUs. In contrast, many other systems are just leveraging the GPU for certain steps along the FE method and memory transfer between CPU and GPU is hindering to fully exploit the benefits of GPUs. Optionally, RISTRA can visualize the simulation results already contained in GPU memory without further transfer in order to enable visual analysis by the user. With sufficient GPU memory, RISTRA can solve problems with more than 10 million degrees of freedom (DOF).
RISTRA currently supports: linear structural analysis, tetrahedral meshes, linear, quadratic and cubic shape functions (TET4, TET10, TET20), linear isotropic and anisotropic materials as well as time-dependent simulation.
RISTRA has been developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, Darmstadt, Germany. As Fraunhofer being an applied research organisation, as a service we offer adaptation of our software to meet new requirements and customer-specific workflows.
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Fraunhofer IGD – experts on 3D
Fraunhofer IGD has been setting standards in visual computing for over 30 years. Visual computing combines computer graphics and computer vision into new applications. We flexibly combine our unique range of skills and technologies to suit our customers‘ particular needs and wishes.
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