Trek Bicycle Competes in Tour de France With Bikes Developed Utilizing NVIDIA GPUs

NVIDIA RTX is spinning new cycles for designs. Trek Bicycle is utilizing GPUs to carry design ideas to life.

The Wisconsin-based firm, one of many largest bicycle producers on the planet, goals to create bikes with the highest-quality craftsmanship. With its new accomplice Lidl, a global retailer chain, Trek Bicycle additionally owns a biking workforce, now known as Lidl-Trek. The workforce is competing within the annual Tour de France stage race on Trek Bicycle’s flagship lineup, which incorporates the Emonda, Madone and Velocity ​​Idea. Most of the workforce’s equipment and tools, such because the wheels and street race helmets, have been additionally designed at Trek.

Bicycle design entails advanced physics — and a key problem is balancing aerodynamic effectivity with consolation and experience high quality. To handle this, the workforce at Trek is utilizing NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs to run high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, setting new benchmarks for aerodynamics in a bicycle that is additionally snug to experience and handles easily.

The designers and engineers are additional enhancing their workflows utilizing NVIDIA RTX expertise in Dell Precision workstations, together with the NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU, in addition to a Dell Precision 7920 working twin RTX A6000 GPUs.

Visualizing Bicycle Designs in Actual Time

To kick off the product design course of, the workforce begins with person analysis to generate early design ideas and develop a spread of concepts. Then, they construct prototypes and iterate the design as wanted.

To enhance efficiency, the bikes have to really feel a sure manner, whether or not riders are taking it on the street or the path. So Trek spends a whole lot of time with athletes to determine the place to make important adjustments, together with tweaks to geometry and the flexibleness of the body and taking the sting off of bumps.

The designers use graphics-intensive utility instruments for his or her computer-aided design workflows, together with Adobe Substance 3D, Cinema 4D, KeyShot, Redshift and SOLIDWORKS. For CFD simulations, the Trek Efficiency Analysis workforce makes use of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ from Siemens Digital Industries Software program to benefit from the GPU processing capabilities.

NVIDIA RTX GPUs offered Trek with a large leap ahead for design and engineering. The visualization workforce can simply faucet into RTX expertise to iterate quicker and present extra choices in designs. They’ll additionally use Cinema 4D and Redshift with RTX to supply high-quality renderings and even to visualise completely different designs in close to actual time.

Michael Hammond, the lead for digital visible communications at Trek Bicycle, explains the significance of getting time for iterations. “The quicker we will render a picture or animation, the quicker we will enhance it,” he stated. “However on the identical time, we do not need to lose particulars or spend time recreating fashions.”

With the assistance of the RTX A5500, Trek’s digital visible workforce can push previous inventive limits and attain the ultimate design a lot quicker. “On common, the RTX GPU performs 12x quicker than our community rendering, which is on CPU cores,” stated Hammond. “For a render that takes about two hours to finish on our community, it solely takes round 10-12 minutes on the RTX A5500 — meaning I can do 12x the iterations, which ends up in higher high quality rendering and animation in much less time.”

Accelerating CFD Simulations

Over the previous decade, adoption of CFD has grown as a important instrument for engineers and tools designers as a result of it permits them to realize higher insights into the habits of their designs. However CFD is greater than an evaluation instrument — it is used to make enhancements with out having to resort to time-consuming and costly bodily testing for each design. For this reason Trek has built-in CFD into its product growth workflows.

The aerodynamics workforce at Trek depends on Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to optimize the efficiency of every bike. To offer a cushty experience and easy dealing with whereas attaining one of the best aerodynamic efficiency, the Trek engineers designed the most recent era Madone to make use of IsoFlow, a singular function designed to extend rider consolation whereas lowering drag.

The Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulations profit from the velocity of accelerated GPU computing, and it enabled the engineers to chop down simulation runtimes by 85 days, as they may run CFD simulations 4-5x quicker on NVIDIA A100 GPUs in comparison with their 128-core CPU-based HPC server.

The workforce also can analyze extra advanced physics in CFD to raised perceive how the air is shifting in real-world unsteady circumstances.

“Now that we will run increased constancy and extra correct simulations and nonetheless meet deadlines, we’re in a position to cut back wind tunnel testing time for vital value financial savings,” stated John Davis, the aerodynamics lead at Trek Bicycle. “Inside the first two months of working CFD on our GPUs, we have been in a position to cancel a deliberate wind tunnel take a look at as a result of elevated confidence we had in simulation outcomes.”

Study extra about Trek Bicycle and GPU-accelerated Simcenter STAR-CCM+.

And be a part of us at SIGGRAPH, which runs from Aug. 6-10, to see the most recent applied sciences shaping the way forward for design and simulation.