Designing Safer Automobiles – Subaru Migrates HPC to the Cloud with Altair and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Subaru puts safety first by practicing human-oriented manufacturing, and the company's goal is to achieve zero fatal traffic accidents by 2030 – a goal they're using high-performance computing (HPC) to achieve. Subaru has long maintained its own HPC environment for simulation, but as computational processing requirements increased, they ran into a shortage of power and space for expansion. After initially exploring a private cloud, Subaru investigated public cloud options and selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with workload management by Altair PBS Professional. The move was a large-scale operation that was completed in around six weeks – a significantly shorter deployment time than the 3-4 months it would typically take to expand an on-premises HPC environment. In addition to performance optimizations like increasing per-node memory capacity, the Subaru team reduced the amount of data transfer required by setting up remote preprocessing.