High Performance Computer (HPC) Cluster for Engineering Education Simulations

With the advancements in high performance computer (HPC) computing, it is only natural that engineering education also utilizes the massive computational capabilities of large server clusters to enhance student learning. This paper presents recent work in developing and implementing complex engineering simulations for engineering education. Key aspects of this work include developing methods to access the simulations through web pages, creating user friendly input modules (web-based), automated job control system for web submission, efficient core utilization for a large number of simultaneous users, and display of results on the user’s web page. Each of these issues are critical to engineering education due to the unique environment required for using computers in classroom and lab settings. A detailed working example for torsional stress of non-circular bars is given in the paper to illustrate the implementation of a server cluster. Currently, up to 40,000 degree of freedom problems can be solved with the system. Execution time varies depending on the number of cores devoted to a given problem. But even if only one core is used, the solution time is 10-50 faster on the cluster than on the client device (laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.) since the cluste