This AMD case-study shows how one aerospace company uses AMD FirePro GPUs to deliver higher performance, more productive engineering workstations to their development team while keeping costs under control.

3, 2, 1, … lift-off! Orbital ATK builds solid rocket boosters for NASA using AMD FirePro GPUs

This is a dilemma many of us face : maximize productivity for our teams and stay on budget. Productivity comes from faster performance. Productivity also comes from better solutions. And money is money, so we all want the best price/performance solution.

Orbital ATK does some serious work for NASA. They have high-end CAD & CAE software solutions from Siemens PLM Software. They write their own customized simulation code. They have hundreds of engineering workstations and keep to a three-year upgrade cycle.

The company appears dedicated to providing good tools for their development team, and as you will see below, they want to get the most for their money. The AMD FirePro graphics solutions help them by :

• providing certified 3D graphics performance for CAD

• accelerating commercial and in-house developed simulation problems using OpenCL

• supporting productive multi-display configurations using 2 or more monitors

• delivering ROI with cost-effective graphics solutions

Mission possible 

When astronauts head into deep space on NASA’s new Space Launch System it will be solid rocket boosters designed and built by Orbital ATK that send them on their way. A major producer of solid rocket propulsion systems, Orbital ATK Flight Systems Group is also building the rocket motors for the launch abort system that will sit on top of the Orion spacecraft and quickly lift the crew to safety if problems develop during launch. 

The group is part of Orbital ATK (OA), a long-term supplier to national governments and military organizations, which employs over 14,000 people across the US. There are over 2,000 employees at sites in Utah, which have produced solid rocket motors for space launch, military and defense applications. OA also builds numerous other aerospace products in Utah. These include flares and decoys for both military and civil use, and composite parts for military and commercial aerospace. Within the over 5 million square feet of facilities in Utah, highly capable teams design, manufacture, test and deliver critical products for a diverse range of customers including the US Department of Defense, NASA and commercial entities. 

Power when it is needed 

Orbital ATK often needs to produce complex one-off tooling. Design and manufacturing engineers based in Utah use high-end CAD/CAM/CAE software, predominantly NX from Siemens PLM. “NX is a tier 1 CAD tool which is highly graphics intensive,” explains Nathan Christensen, Senior Manager, Engineering Tools and Analysis. “As a single threaded modeling application, it makes heavy demands on the graphics card.” To cope with this, OA uses AMD FirePro™ W5000 professional graphics in the Dell 3600 series workstations provided to engineers. 

Jim Maul, Senior Principal Engineer, Engineering Tools and Analysis developed the standard workstation configuration which includes a four core, 1620 processer and 32 Gb RAM optimized for CAD. “Although we have a large high performance compute cluster for the most demanding calculations, many engineers also use workstations to run structural, thermal or fluid dynamics simulations, plus we want everyone to have plenty of CPU horsepower when they need it. The combination of Dell and AMD FirePro™ professional graphics does the job.” 

Orbital ATK engineers and programmers develop specialized simulation codes for the US government, the US Air Force, and for internal and commercial use. For example, HERO™ is highly specialized simulation software used for heat transfer, erosion and ablation predictions. These internally developed codes take advantage of the OpenGL protocol and leverage the power of the AMD FireProTM W5000 GPU, enabling users to run calculations much faster than if they were solving solely on the CPU. 

“GPU performance is very good, we have had excellent results,” comments Christensen. “Some types of analyses lend themselves to OpenGL methods, for example both computational analysis and complex thermal analysis can be done really well with AMD’s GPU cards. We have seen vastly improved performance compared to using the CPU alone. Orbital ATK’s thermal ablation code HERO is very effective in leveraging GPUs to reduce solution times.” 

Heath Dewey, Sr Software Engineer and developer of GPU code for HERO added, “AMD FireProTM W5000 graphics cards provide very good performance and reliability with our in-house developed engineering software. The large amount of on-card graphics memory and high computational power enable HERO to perform high-speed view factor calculations on very large finite-element models.” 

Maximizing the IT budget 

It is critical that engineers have hardware that meets their needs and so Orbital ATK works on a three-year refresh cycle. However, with hundreds of engineering workstation users on site, a hardware update becomes a significant investment. Jim Maul observes: “When we do an upgrade, price is always an issue and we must justify our decisions with business and IT management. We therefore focus on price performance for the graphics and that is one advantage we see with AMD. We get the performance we want at a price point we can afford and that is the reason we have selected AMD professional graphics for the past three refreshes.” 

Jim Maul explains that prior to the last workstation refresh, he looked into the cost of an equivalent performing graphics card. “We use some applications where one card might give a slightly better performance over another. For example, we have a number of engineers using Citrix XenDesktop for remote CAD access, so we checked out an alternative card. It was about $200 more. Given that we needed to purchase a several hundred, it didn’t seem an effective use of our budget for a marginal improvement.” 

Reliability, affordability and constant improvement 

AMD cards have been used at Orbital ATK since 2009 and according to Nathan Christensen, users are very pleased with graphics performance. “AMD cards are certified for many of the software applications that we use and overall reliability on FirePro cards has been very good.” 

Jim Maul adds: “OA is continually working with suppliers to provide engineers with the best and most cost effective tools and AMD has a good track record as partner to OA. Our AMD contacts have been very supportive and we have been able to improve our capability with each refresh, for example, we moved from 512Mb of memory to 2Gb on our graphics cards during the last upgrade.” 

AMD FireProTM Fast Facts: 

AMD FirePro™ W5000 workstation graphics 

Memory:

• 2GB GDDR5 

Compute performance:

• 1.3 TFLOPS single precision and 79.2 GFLOPS double precision floating point performance 

Technologies: 

• AMD Eyefinity technology: supports up to 3 displays1 
• AMD PowerTune technology: optimizes GPU power usage2 
• AMD ZeroCore Power technology: reduces power consumption at idle2