GENCI should be proud. Thanks to its support through the HPC for SMB project (in partnership with INRIA and BPI France), the startup HydrOcean has received the prestigious IDC HPC Innovation Excellence Award for the scientific quality of its works in simulation. Created seven years ago to develop and sell solutions derived from research conducted at the fluid dynamics laboratory of “Ecole Centrale de Nantes,” HydrOcean specializes in fluid flow simulation for the marine and industrial sector. The SPH-flow software that is the flagship of this startup (now with more than 20 employees) is a solver based on a particle method for modeling complex fluid flows and fluid/structure interactions. SPH-flow is also in itself a model of scale-up performance: its MPI parallelism achieves an operating ratio of 85% to 100%. What’s more, a special GPU version is available which, according to HydrOcean, improves the solver’s performance by a factor of 5.

“We are especially happy with the success of HydrOcean, which we have been assisting for more than 18 months,” delights Catherine Rivière, GENCI CEO. “Not only does this demonstrate that supercomputing is a source of innovation, and hence, competitiveness for small and medium companies, it also shows the need to help them achieve its full potential.”

Today, HydrOcean is developing its own digital simulation tools, which it uses to offer specialized design assistance services in the four sectors of shipbuilding, offshore operations, boating, and marine energy. Good luck and Godspeed to them for the future!