The objective of the paper is to describe how the cloud based HPC services help to investigate the behavior of automotive part components involved in structural crash and NVH test simulation. Currently, market requirements related to vehicle weight reduction and cost cutting are driving the industry to accelerate their innovation and to introduce new design and new material and manufacturing processes. The challenge for supply chain is to handle conflicting requirements and bring revolutionary changes to vehicles, while at the same time cutting the development costs and time drastically. Business scale-up is one of the main competitiveness factors. This required mastering an efficient and flexible process for customization and localization. Divergence of the models are inherent phenomena with the current silo approach due to the complexity of the interactions; CAD-CAE, CAE-CAE. Methodology: To answer this challenge, we will apply Virtual Prototyping with a rather holistic view, several full vehicle simulation models all based on one unique central Body In White subsystem, named the Single Core Model approach. This disruptive approach will enable to support collaborative decision making process during the Product Development phase; including engineering stakeholders from 3 different disciplines: Crash & Safety, Durability, NVH. The use of HPC cloud services will also be a huge benefit for multi-site companies. Indeed, Gestamp R&D Centers located in Spain, France and Sweden have increasing needs in handling projects over several locations. Therefore, the HPC enables to access and share the data, to run simulations and to analyze the results in all the relevant locations through a conventional web browser. In summary, this HPC cloud application will enable a more efficient project handling by reducing data transfer time and by improving the communication between the different stakeholders of a project. Limitations of this study: Therefore, this innovative development methodology calls for extensive computer resources, which was considered as a major obstacle to go through this experience. Cloud Computing seems to be the ad-hoc solution as of today for fast growing manufacturing companies like GESTAMP. This is a major enabler; it offers the necessary flexibility to access to HPC resources when it is needed at an affordable cost. Results: The experiment was run on extreme factory, Bull's HPC on-demand compute service, which gave Gestamp the easiness, performance and flexibility that they needed to perform their work. Conclusions: This experiment is part of European FP7 - Fortissimo project, it showed how to avoid last minute engineering design changes, and it should result in improved competitiveness in order to reduce the development period, to shortening time to market, to improve quality at competitive pricing. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.
