Containerization, Cloud, Collaboration: Cutting-Edge Approaches with Altair and CIQ

With the exciting collaboration between CIQ and Altair, the fusion of containerization and cloud technologies is propelling OpenRadioss to new heights. We delved into the details of this dynamic partnership in our recent webinar, which features Eric Lequiniou, senior vice president, Radioss development, and Altair solver HPC. 

You can watch the entire video here. Keep reading to learn more! 

OpenRadioss

Altair, a global leader in computational science and artificial intelligence, developed OpenRadioss, a finite element analysis software that is often used for crash simulation, and made it available to the open source community in 2022 with the goal of accelerating innovation. It uses an explicit time integration scheme to simulate highly nonlinear crashes and impacts that cannot be handled by implicit solvers. Models can have over 20 million elements to represent all the detailed components involved in a simulation. Running these large simulations requires massive parallel compute resources, which OpenRadioss supports through MPI and OpenMP parallelization. By open sourcing the code, Altair aims to collaborate with the community to rapidly advance OpenRadioss capabilities to meet emerging challenges in transportation, electronics, and other industries.

Containerization

Soon after the open source launch, CIQ containerized OpenRadioss using Apptainer to make it easier to install and use. Containerization automates syncing code from GitHub, compiling, executing, and updating, avoiding common version mismatch issues. To test deployment, CIQ ran a containerized OpenRadioss car crash simulation and visualized the results in ParaView, which we demonstrate in this webinar. 

Cloud Deployment

In addition to containers, CIQ collaborated to create Oracle VM images with OpenRadioss and ParaView pre-installed so users can instantly spin up ready-to-use instances. The cloud provides convenient access to OpenRadioss and flexible compute resources to run large simulations faster.

Multi-Node Scaling

CIQ's new Fuzzball software can orchestrate OpenRadioss across multiple nodes to scale to large cluster resources. Fuzzball's container-focused job orchestration approach is well suited to running MPI workloads like Open Radioss on HPC infrastructure.

Model Support

OpenRadioss can run models from other popular software like LS-DYNA without modification, making it accessible to more researchers and engineers familiar with those formats. The community continues to add support for more model features and formats.

Open Source Community

One year after launch, the OpenRadioss community continues to grow rapidly with community events held in Paris and Germany, growth in downloads and contributions, and new resources like tutorial videos to lower barriers to entry. CIQ has been an early supporter, contributing containerization automation and sponsoring community events.

The collaboration between CIQ and Altair on OpenRadioss provides a great example of open source community engagement. By combining expertise in containers, cloud, HPC software, and simulation, we have made OpenRadioss easier to access and scale. Be sure to watch the entire video to learn more. Then, try out OpenRadioss and contribute to advancing this powerful open source simulation software!