Dätwyler expands data center to handle simulations

Dätwyler is strengthening its product development capabilities by way of a new data center for global simulations. The industrial company, which employs more than 8,000 staff worldwide, produces over 100 million high-quality elastomer components every day for the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors, the food industry, as well as the mobility and energy sectors. These components are developed through simulations.

“At such numbers, product development without simulation is no longer conceivable”, comments Rudolf Randler, Head of Mobility Engineering Switzerland at Datwyler, in a press release. However, before the expansion by CADFEM, a company based in Grafing near Munich, only two simulation or HPC calculations were possible at the same time on twelve cores each. “As more and more projects are being processed at the same time and simulation engineers have to complete increasingly complex and time-consuming, highly non-linear models in ever shorter time frames, a proper race for available capacity has begun”, according to Randler.

At the Datwyler headquarters in Altdorf in the canton of Uri, Switzerland, the company will have at its disposal a 256-core cluster instead of the previous 36 cores, while the storage volume for active project data has also been ramped up to 36 terabytes. At the same time, an optimization of the international licenses for the Ansys simulation software grants partners access from anywhere, anytime. The IT system in the Schattdorf Competence Center has been opened up for use by all users, which in turn avoids the need to set up regional systems.

With the newly expanded computing capacity, the time to market launch in product development should be significantly reduced. “And that increases our competitiveness”, as Randler concludes. ce/mm