A new AI foundation model will give SimScale users “an instant AI prediction” for their pump designs.
Welcome to Engineering Paper. Last week I covered news from Nvidia’s GTC Conference, at which the chipmaker boasted that its Blackwell processors are making simulation 50 times faster.
There’s more Nvidia-related simulation news to go over today, starting with cloud simulation provider SimScale.
SimScale’s AI foundation model for pump simulation
SimScale announced at GTC that it has developed “the world’s first foundation AI model for centrifugal pump simulation.” It uses AI to quickly predict the results of a full simulation.
SimScale developed the foundation model with Nvidia PhysicsNeMo, Nvidia’s framework for physics-based AI. It’s integrated into SimScale’s platform via Nvidia’s Omniverse Blueprint (see the following item for more on Blueprint.)
SimScale already allows users to develop predictive AI models, but users must train those models themselves. The pump foundation model is different. Jonathan Wilde, vice president of product management at SimScale, told me that the model is already trained on thousands of simulations covering more than 50 pump models with different geometries and operating points.
“We’ve used that data to train a generic pump model,” Wilde said. “If somebody brings a pump to SimScale, they don’t need to pre-train anymore… they can get an instant AI prediction.”
SimScale took the training data from its public projects repository, which includes simulations from SimScale’s Community user tier. Those users get free, limited access to the cloud simulation platform, but their data is openly available (similar to Onshape for CAD). When I asked about the reliability of that public data, Wilde said that SimScale manually validated the simulation setups.
Paying SimScale customers can request access to the pump foundation model, but Wilde says the company hasn’t yet determined how it will license or charge for the technology. SimScale’s non-paying Community users cannot currently access any of SimScale’s AI capabilities, though Wilde said that “will almost certainly change.”
This is just the first of what Wilde expects to be many AI foundation models.
“Pumps are just a starting point. We wanted to start with something that wasn’t too simple, but also not insanely complex,” Wilde told me. “Next we’ll make a valve model, and we’ll just keep iterating from there. It won’t always be CFD, we’ll add some FEA, but we’re going to try and continually build more foundation models.”
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