The Ter@tec Campus has already attracted major industrial and R&D companies, of small and large sizes. BULL and the French Atomic Energy Committee (or CEA) have set up a Laboratory for Extreme Computing, while Intel, Genci, the University of Versailles and the CEA have opened an Exascale Computing Research center, facilities respectively aimed at developing innovative HPC architectures and increasing software performance to enable more efficient, more powerful simulation solutions. The Ter@tec Campus is also home to the CEA's Très Grand Centre de Calcul (Very Large Computing Center), an essential tool for conducting research in the fields of computing and simulation.
Today, ESI is actively involved in several collaborative supercomputing projects, hosted by IRT System X and based at the Ter@tec Campus. ESI also took part in the "Complex Systems Design Lab" project, led by the Systematic Paris Region competitiveness cluster. Completed in September 2012, this research project gave birth to a comprehensive cloud environment for Virtual Product Engineering, enabling collaborative decision making by providing robustness criteria and possible tradeoffs between different product design options.
Vincent Chaillou, COO, ESI Group, explains the importance of supporting the progresses of HPC technologies in order to support Big Data simulations: "ESI customers around the globe use Virtual Manufacturing to predict the cause and effect relationships taking place in the manufacturing of each component, sub-assembly and assembly to achieve a full end-to-end Virtual Prototype of their product. ESI clients can then enter an optimization strategy, which involves increasingly larger models and consequentially larger size calculation! The rapid evolution of High Performance Computing is key to support the development of Virtual Product Engineering."
On June 20th, 2013, Alain de Rouvray, CEO, ESI Group, and Vincent Chaillou, COO, ESI Group, joined by key customers from the automotive, aerospace and heavy industry, partners and investors, will inaugurate ESI's new office space. After the ceremony, ESI will offer a live demonstration of its Virtual Reality solution, IC.IDO. This solution is used by manufacturers across many industries to improve the design of new products, eliminating design errors early in the design process. Thanks to IC.IDO, engineers can perform collaborative engineering reviews, evaluate and optimize assembly and disassembly sequences, verify resources and tooling for both manufacture and maintenance, and support documentation and training; all before any part of the product is made. A Virtual Reality installation, providing an immersive and interactive experience, will be located permanently in ESI's offices at Ter@tec Campus and benefit diverse HPC projects.
On June 25th & 26th, ESI will participate in the 8th Ter@tec Forum, an event dedicated to the development of numerical simulation methods and HPC. Held every year at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, this event regularly attracts over a thousand participants. On June 26, 2013, Etienne de Pommery, Business Development Director for Aeronautics, ESI Group, will cochair with Vincent Cousin from Advancity a Workshop, entitled "Modeling and simulation to support sustainable cities". Workshop chairs and attendees will collectively attempt to determine how modeling and simulation can be applied to the transformation of cities.