Flowdeck meets Putti
At Putti we love seeing inspiring start-up's that are taking on the world and solving big problems.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is the area of physics and engineering that analyses how objects move through air or water; or how moving air or water moves around stationary objects. Current approaches to simulating this are highly expensive and/or require deep domain knowledge. Flowdeck are pioneering the democratisation of CFD simulation technology through a scalable, and easier to use, cloud-based approach.
They came to Putti having done a lot of heavy lifting, including building the fundamental Solver responsible for the vast computations required by a simulation. Their need was for a capable partner who could improve the user journey, cradle the Solver in a more sophisticated web application and set up programmatically controlled auto-scaling infrastructure. We were excited to get involved.
The challenge
Flowdeck already had a working proof-of-concept consisting of their own Solver with rudimentary front-end interface and a manual single-instance approach to infrastructure.
However, in order to get to a product ready for industry trials, they needed a more advanced and user friendly web application between the user and the solver, along with the ability for the software to dynamically spin up and assign infrastructure as required by customer's simulations.
The biggest single challenge of this project did turn out to be the programmatic control of a scalable containerised approach to the infrastructure. Bear in mind that these simulations aren't light-weight; depending on the size they can run for minutes, hours or even days, and put serious demands on compute resources.
Our approach
First, we built a clean, modern web application that enabled users to manage their projects and simulations with ease.
Then, within the web application, we engineered a fully automated infrastructure management system to replace the previous manual processes. Now, when a user needs to run a simulation:
- A dedicated high-performance compute instance is automatically spun up.
- The Dockerised simulation environment ensures consistent accuracy.
- The job runs, monitors itself, and wraps up.
- The compute resources shut themselves down when finished.
All without any human interaction with AWS.
Results and outcomes
The real victory was helping Flowdeck's world-class simulation engine shine via a modern, automated delivery system, unlocking the next stage of their product evolution.
We can't wait to see Flowdeck in the market, making CFD more accessible and affordable for physical product designers worldwide.
And for us it was a great experience, both working with other innovators and being pushed to deliver at the leading edge of infrastructure automation.