Destination Mars
Figure 1
Orbital ATK accelerates efficiently with AMD FirePro™ professional graphics
Mission possible
Customer:
Orbital ATK Propulsion Systems
Industry:
Aerospace
Business Opportunity:
Maintain quality and reputation by ensuring
the efficiency of CAD engineers
Maximize IT resources across a large user base
Provide cost effective graphics performance on
standardized engineering workstations
Solution:
AMD FirePro™ professional graphics for CAD/
CAM/CAE professionals
Business Impression:
Optimal price performance point
Power to handle CAD heavy graphics requirement
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.
Figure 2
Enough capacity for engineering
analysis/simulation
Power when it is needed
GPU delivers fast performance when coding
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.
Enhanced graphics value with each IT refresh
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.
CASE STUDY | ORBITAL ATK
CASE STUDY | ORBITAL ATK
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
“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.”
“AMD FireProTM cards work well in our
standard and advanced configuration
engineering workstations. Standardization
on AMD has also been a very effective
way to provide consistent and repeatable
graphics performance across the
organization for all applications. For the
first time, standard workstation
configurations include dual or even triple
monitors, both supported by AMD.
This has proven to be a huge productivity
boost for engineers.”
Nathan G. Christensen,
Senior Manager, Engineering Tools and Analysis,
Orbital ATK
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
For more information visit www.fireprographics.com
© 2015 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, FirePro, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other names are for
informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
1. AMD Eyefinity technology supports up to six DisplayPort™ monitors on an enabled graphics card. Supported display quantity, type and resolution vary by model and board design; confirm specifications with manufacturer before purchase. To enable
more than two displays, or multiple displays from a single output, additional hardware such as DisplayPort-ready monitors or DisplayPort 1.2 MST-enabled hubs may be required. A maximum of two active adapters is recommended for consumer
systems. See www.amd.com/eyefinityfaq for full details.
2. AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD FirePro™ products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all
technologies – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.
Images Courtesy NASA and Orbital ATK
Figure 1: Test fire conducted at Promontory, UT of the Orbital ATK designed Launch Abort System (LAS) rocket motor which will be used on NASA’s Orion Spacecraft. The four nozzle reverse thrust design is the first US rocket of its kind.
Figure 2: Artist rendering of the NASA’s Space Launch System lifting off the pad powered by two of the world’s largest solid rocket motors developed by Orbital ATK. The SLS vehicle was developed to go back to the moon and eventually on to Mars.
Figure 3: First static test fire of NASA’s Space Launch System solid rocket booster developed by Orbital ATK. The SLS booster produces 3.6 million lbs of thrust which equates to more than 14 Boeing 747-400s at full takeoff power.
Figure 4 : NX solid model of an Orbital ATK single stage concept vehicle rendered on the W5000.
Figure 5: Thermal ablation simulation using Orbital ATK developed HERO thermal analysis code rendered on an AMD FirePro W5000 graphics card. Simulation results show thermal insuation after 5000 F erosive gases exposure.