SUBARU Goes Live with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for High Performance Computing

Oracle today announced that SUBARU Corporation has moved its simulation and 3D visualization workloads responsible for improving the quality of collision safety performance and driving performance to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). SUBARU was able to improve its development cycle, gain significant efficiencies and reduce operational costs by reducing computational timeframes by approximately 20 percent with High Performance Computing (HPC) on OCI.

With a focus on improving drivers’ “Enjoyment and Peace of Mind,” SUBARU is implementing improvements to enhance design and development efficiency, agility, and flexibility. To achieve this, SUBARU recognized it needed to increase the resources supporting its computationally intensive HPC workloads that perform vast and complex simulations to improve its vehicles’ collision safety and performance. Aware of how cloud technology is being used in the automotive industry to provide HPC resources to support computer aided engineering (CAE) simulations, SUBARU selected OCI to move its large HPC workloads of up to tens of thousands of cores to OCI from an on-premises environment.

“Our goal has always been to be a trusted partner for our customers and to provide attractive and distinctive products that bring enjoyment and peace of mind. We rely on technology to help us continuously improve and innovate so that we can offer the best experience to our customers. Being able to quickly conduct the vast number of simulations needed to improve crash safety and driving performance is a key focus for us. We selected OCI HPC to improve the speed of computations of collision simulations and to optimize costs. OCI gives us access to the cloud tools we need so we can automate and run jobs seamlessly, enabling faster design and development,” said Mr. Yoshihiro Takekuma, IT Operation and Management Section, Engineering Information Management Department, SUBARU Corporation.

Using OCI bare metal HPC computing, coupled with fast cluster networking, which delivers less than 2 microseconds of latency and 100 Gbps of bandwidth, SUBARU now has the computing resources it needs to scale rapidly to meet demand peaks. Previously, system expansion within its on-premises environments was often restricted by lack of space, power, cost, and IT resources. Since using OCI to deliver consistent high performance and greater stability for its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, SUBARU has been able to make improvements to the internal acoustics of its vehicles to deliver a quieter drive. It has also enabled SUBARU to eliminate any variation in computation of collision analysis, by providing ideal conditions to perform structural calculations.

OCI also supports various third-party solutions through Oracle Cloud Marketplace to help customers quickly find applications and services that can help them optimize their cloud deployments, including from Altair®, a global leader in computational science and artificial intelligence (AI). SUBARU has further reduced costs by using the cloud bursting function of Altair® PBS Professional® in combination with OCI to start the nodes required for calculation and delete the nodes when the calculation is completed, bringing flexibility to the allocation of resources.

“In automotive engineering, having access to powerful and affordable HPC, is essential to run the computationally intensive and highly latency sensitive simulations and calculations needed to deliver the best outcomes when it comes to car safety and the driving experience. By providing high performance and elasticity at lower cost, OCI HPC is ideal for companies like SUBARU that require large simulation environments. We look forward to OCI fueling further technological innovations for SUBARU and contributing to their improved competitiveness,” said Karan Batta, vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

ARGO GRAPHICS Inc., one of SUBARU’s long-term IT partners, supported the migration of SUBARU’s HPC workloads to OCI, which started operations in May 2022.

SUBARU also leveraged Oracle Cloud Lift Services as part of its initial verification process to support its proof of concept to help issues relating to cloud migration with its production machine testing environment. Oracle Cloud Lift Services also provided SUBARU and ARGO GRAPHICS with the necessary OCI HPC skills training.

SUBARU selected OCI HPC in December 2021.

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