VISEO supports AVSimulation based on the design of its HPC solution SCANeR Cloud with AWS

AVSimulation is a joint venture of Sogeclair/Dassault Systèmes/UTAC/Renault that helps smart mobility players reduce their time-to-market and development costs by reducing prototype numbers and physical testing through simulation, choose VISEO and AWS to assist in the design of its HPC solution SCANeR Cloud.

What is SCANeR?

SCANeR is the most comprehensive solution on the market. It allows users to configure, prepare, simulate and analyze results. Open and modular, it can be used by multidisciplinary teams working on different aspects of the same project (lighting, AD/ADAS, HMI and others). In addition, SCANeR is the only simulation software that can be used throughout the development cycle: from the validation of requirements to acceptance testing (ViL).

SCANeR Cloud project ambitions 

SCANeR Cloud is a massive web-based computing platform that allows millions of SCANeR simulations to be run simultaneously to develop or validate intelligent mobility systems.

Bulk simulation is required to design and simulate all test cases. This is due to the time required or the amount of data generated. SOTIF (Safety Of The Intended Functionality) requires the production of billions of Km to ensure that all situations are handled correctly.  Beyond this certification, there is also a need to facilitate the production of data by:

- Obtaining traceability of the scenarios and components of the digital vehicle

- Validating the non-deterioration of an updated component

- Versioning its components and centralizing the results

SCANeR® Cloud was designed with these use cases in mind. The platform allows simulating billions of Km from a simple browser. This allows users to prepare, execute and evaluate their test campaigns.

Prepare:

- A SCANeR configuration

- A set of scenarios with their dependencies

- A system under test (SUT)

- A specific vehicle model under test (VUT)

Execute the project by defining:

- The number of calculation nodes desired

- If there is a need for a GPU

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Analysis of the results right from the start of the tests:

- By observing the parallel coordinate graph

- Parameters validating the criteria are displayed in blue

- Parameters that do not validate one of the criteria are displayed in red

- Using the details of the scenarios

- By exporting records

This makes it possible to detect whether the control law meets the requirements and, if not, to correct it more effectively.

SCANeR Cloud offers scalability, allowing an increase in the number of simulated use cases. This makes it possible to cover a very large test area and to find anomalies more easily, to make systems more robust and to approve vehicles more efficiently. All the while not increasing computing times exorbitantly thanks to parallelization enabled by the power of the Cloud. This power is available on demand, whether it is small or large. SCANeR Cloud therefore provides unprecedented flexibility for performing bulk testing campaigns

Why Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a key player in the automotive ecosystem, where AVSimulation operates. The services offered by AWS allow for critical scalability, which is highly available, globally, and an excellent security model. The use of Amazon Web Services is first implemented for software development activities, then towards the realization of the SCANer Cloud platform.

With VISEO's expertise in cloud-based application modernization, AVSimulation was able to realize the design of its SCANeR Cloud SaaS offering to remain the leader in automotive digital simulation.

VISEO's choice

VISEO has more than 5 years of concrete projects and both technical and functional experience with major names in the automotive world.

AVSimulation called on VISEO for its ability to lead an agile development approach and the design of an HPC (High Power Computing) cloud architecture on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud.

Key project-specific AWS solutions

The SCANeR Cloud platform aims to provide an easy-to-access web interface for customers, enabling them to dynamically launch a large computing power (massive simulation), within the limits of the financial means and the processing time desired by the customer.

Depending on the customer's request, the platform instantiates a large number of Docker containers, each performing steps of a simulation scenario based on a specific set of conditions.

Beyond the traditional services to manage this ephemeral horde of containers, we use the following key AWS services:

- AWS Batch and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2),
(Triggering the HPC grid that runs massive simulation scenarios with Dockers running in dynamically provisioned EC2s)

- Amazon EventBridge and Amazon Simple Notification Service
(Propagating AWS Batch Job Status Changes),

- Amazon S3 and Amazon FSx for Lustre
(Storage of inputs and outputs of simulations executed on the platform),

- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
(Web API hosting specially developed for this project)

What is the added value of AWS for AVSimulation?

The wide variety of functional bricks offered by the Amazon Web Services cloud allows you to create an efficient spreadsheet. This facilitates the provision of an HPC platform. All on demand and equipped with the latest generation GPUs to run simulations from a browser.

This scalability makes it easy to allocate the desired number of resources according to need and budget. It is thus possible to use a large number of SCANeR computes to obtain simulation results very quickly. However, if the need is not urgent, it is possible to start off with a more restricted deployment and limit the use of licenses.

In the same spirit, the topology of AWS machines can be customized. When use cases become more complex and it becomes necessary to improve the hardware configuration, it is sufficient to modify the AWS reference. This allows to increase the amount of vCPU, RAM and GPU but also to change the generation.

The decentralization and simplification of this type of infrastructure is what makes a platform like SCANeR Cloud so strong. It is now possible to run simulations that lasted more than 15h30 on a workstation on a browser, in less than an hour. Parallelizing the workload on a single AWS job, divides the execution time by 4. This means that in the case of 16 jobs, 64 “tasks” are executed simultaneously. Therefore, the time drops from 15h30 to 30 min.

For the moment, in order to isolate the resources as much as possible, the architecture is in full-stack silo mode. In addition, access to data stored on the AWS S3 service is restricted and encryption is enabled. 

Using an Infrastructure As a Code (IAC) approach allows the SCANeR Cloud solution to be quickly instantiated. This approach allows AVSimulation to quickly deliver its massive simulation platform, anywhere in the world, as close as possible to the end customer, isolating data from each customer.

"We are excited to be able to offer our customers around the world the SCANeR cloud platform. We have chosen to combine our SCANeR software and the AWS solution which are aligned in their modular, open philosophy and which offer unmatched computing power and opportunities for acceleration and cycle reduction and therefore a true competitive advantage usable at will. Explain Emmanuel CHEVRIER, Managing Director and Director of Services AVSimulation. We particularly appreciated the collaboration with VISEO, who supported us from the design phase in this digital transformation with an agile and win-win spirit. In the future, we plan to expand upon this more than successful collaboration."

“VISEO specializes in cloud-based application modernization, combining the agility of software development with native cloud architecture expertise. I am very proud of the synergy between AVSimulation and VISEO engineers, based on the solid foundation of the Amazon Web Services cloud. Synergy that made it possible to realize an excellent solution of massive numerical simulation for a very real future world!” Didier ROUSSEAU, Cloud Pratice Manager VISEO