Improving the productivity of hull designers with HPC in the cloud: the LincoSim experience

This paper presents the real-world experience of usage of the LincoSim web application. LincoSim is an innovative web application dedicated to the design process of hulls by means of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) runs and is developed and tested within the EU funded project LINCOLN. LincoSim merges a set of complex technological bricks including CFD 3D Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes models, parallel computing and WebGL into an intuitive web interface. This work focuses on the service statistics analysis to understand what kind of impact emerging web technologies can have on vessel design process, when mixed with advanced computational tools into design and engineering maritime applications. The web user interface has been opened to LINCOLN vessel designers in April 2018 and supports now three different groups of users with very different competences and backgrounds. The usage results show in terms of service robustness an uptime value of over 99%. The service usability outcomes are also very promising with more than 40 geometries uploaded, more then 500 completed simulations and with a rate of simulations failure of about 7%. After a one year of usage, the authors have also measured a 90% improvement by vessel designers in time saving for simulation preparation, submission and results analysis for a generic resistance curve task making the LincoSim a valuable vessel design tool.