Generative by Design: How NVIDIA Quadro Is Transforming the Design Process for Engineers

PTC’s new software uses AI and real-time simulation to let designers explore and visualize multiple design options in real time.
by Don Breda

Design professionals will soon be able to create better products faster than ever, thanks to advances in AI-driven generative design and real-time engineering simulation.

Generative design software allows engineers to improve their product designs by generating multiple alternatives while maintaining design goals, such as materials, weight, strength and cost constraints.

Jim Heppelmann, CEO of Boston-based PTC, will demonstrate this capability for the first time Tuesday in his keynote at the company’s annual LiveWorx user event in Boston, with Creo Parametric 3D modeling software. He’ll also demo AI-driven generative design interacting with PTC’s real-time engineering simulation software, Creo Simulation Live — and how both tools are accelerated by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.

The analysis required for generative design is extremely computationally intensive, frequently requiring hours or even days to compute with traditional CPU computing methods. PTC’s technology overcomes this barrier by shifting the computation load to the GPU.

CUDA Brings Enhanced Design Flow

With AI-driven generative design powered by the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing platform and NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, engineers can quickly explore all permutations of their specified design options, resulting in faster, better optimized product designs. Compute power is also optimized with Quadro, enabling designs to be generated quickly and accurately.

“Computing 200 iterations of a large generative design model with 10 million degrees of freedom can take three days to reach convergence with traditional methods,” said Jesse Coors-Blankenship, senior vice president of technology, Advanced Development, at PTC. “Using an NVIDIA Quadro GV100, our AI-driven generative design can converge that same design in less than three hours — a 96 percent reduction in time.”

Creo Simulation Live is PTC’s native integration of ANSYS Discovery Live in their Creo Parametric design software. It is currently available in Creo Parametric 4.0 and 5.0, and will be available in Creo 6.0 later this month.

While traditional simulation workflows can take from hours to days, and require data exchange between the authoring tool and the analysis tool, Creo Simulation Live uses CUDA and Quadro GPUs to bring real-time simulation directly into the design environment. Engineers can now iterate more quickly with real-time simulation providing feedback on design changes as they make them.

“The impressive speed of Creo Simulation Live is the result of powerful ANSYS solvers running on NVIDIA Quadro CUDA-enabled GPUs,” said Mark Fischer, Sr. Director, CAD Product Management at PTC.

Using CUDA, PTC is able to access exceptional high-performance computing capabilities for AI driven generative design and Creo Simulation Live. At LiveWorx, PTC will demonstrate how generative design results can be analyzed in real time with Creo Simulation Live, and how changes to enhance the structural integrity of designs can be visualized immediately.

“AI is rapidly emerging, and it is more important than ever that the designer has the tools to keep them in the driver’s seat with AI assisting,” said Coors-Blankenship. “The combination of PTC Generative Design software and Creo Simulation Live accelerated with NVIDIA Quadro GPUs makes AI-driven generative design a dynamic and interactive experience for designers. This dynamism is keeping the designer in control of a very powerful and exciting design process.”

Learn more about Creo Simulation Live and stay tuned for AI-driven generative design in Creo 7.