Long live Europe! As part of the Digital Agenda for Horizon 2020, which explicitly recognizes HPC for its value and potential, a short but very interesting workshop has just taken place, entirely devoted to the use of HPC in the automotive sector. Representatives of the largest European car manufacturers and suppliers attended – Porsche, Daimler, Valeo, Faurecia, Renault, PSA Peugeot Citroen, BMW and Volkswagen – who, along with the institutional pillars PRACE and ETP4HPC, presented the new opportunities provided by the Exascale.

As a renewed sign of maturity of an industry where HPC is involved in the entire chain of design and production, the attendees have unanimously emphasized the need for a standard format for data exchange between simulation applications. This is very good news for the entire community, even though the outcome of such initiatives in other sectors show that the effort is no small task. Making a variety of vastly different applications communicate smoothly with each other is likely to require years of development – and will probably include some technical compromises that will frustrate many.

But the overall stakes are critical, starting with reduced time-to-market, which means reducing design time for new vehicles that start to include new materials, automatic driving and significant innovations in mobile multimedia and driver assistance. In addition to a standardized format, other identified needs include virtual reality for real-time animations and the ability to perform physical simulations using both multi-domain and finer-grained models, in the hopes of reducing weight and CO2 consumption in our next vehicles.

European Centers of Excellence, combined with computational resources provided by PRACE and technologies developed by the ETP4HPC framework, offer tremendous innovation opportunities and prospects of many new jobs to this very dynamic industry. Unity being strength, let’s hope this community-level initiative will set an example…