Inductiva API v0.4 release

Hugo Penedones

Author

Luís Sarmento

Author

February 9, 2024

Tags:

Inductiva APIProgrammingHPCSimulationMPI
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Announcing the Inductiva API v0.4 Release!

We are thrilled to announce the latest release of the Inductiva API!

Our goal is to make it easy for scientists and engineers to run large scale simulations of physical systems, without the complexity of managing HPC clusters or being stuck to a proprietary software stack. We believe in the power of open-source, and that’s why we architected our platform to be able to integrate high-quality simulators developed by the scientific community over decades – and expose them via an easy-to-use Python interface. From their laptops, users can launch hundreds or thousands of simulations running in remote servers with the best hardware.

Here are the main highlights of the v0.4 release:

MPI clusters – with a single line of Python code, you can now launch dedicated MPI clusters on-demand. This allows you to run your simulations faster – potentially on hundreds of cpu cores simultaneously – without waiting in queues with jobs from other users. The current version is powered by Google Cloud, but stay tuned for multi-cloud and on-premises support in the future!

More simulators available – we added two great open-source simulators:

  • FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) – a “large-eddy simulation (LES) code for low-speed flows, with an emphasis on smoke and heat transport from fires.” 🔥
  • Reef3D – a hydrodynamics framework, which can be efficiently parallelized, designed to run on a large number of processors. 🌊

This expands the list of previously supported simulators, that included: GROMACs, OpenFOAM, DualSPhysics, SplishSplash, SWASH and XBeach.

Lighter API client package – we made our Python client package much simpler and faster to install. It works smoothly on Linux, MacOs and Windows, as well as containerized Python environments such as Google colab. Two main decisions were taken:

  • The Inductiva python client package now contains only the “core” functionalities of the API: direct access to the simulators and a set of primitives to manage simulation tasks, computational resources and storage.
  • The “high-level” scenarios, such as WindTunnel, or ProteinSolvation, etc are being moved to independent git repositories and python packages. They can now be seen as simulation “apps” that solve a particular problem on top of the core Inductiva API. This opens the door for simulation experts in the broad scientific community to create and share their own scenarios. We are super excited about the possibilities there. If you have ideas about simulation scenarios that you want to expose to the world, drop us a line: we can help!

Improved Logging and CLI – we now expose in real-time on the client side all the logging information produced by simulators running remotely. This allows you to easily detect potential problems as you submit simulations loads via the API. Logging information is shown via our Command Line Interface (CLI) tool, which has also been improved with new commands.

A Powerful Templating Engine – you can now add variable placeholders to your simulation configuration files and set those variables programmatically from Python. This allows you to easily explore large configuration spaces or generate synthetic training data at scale, by automatically creating thousands of variations of a base case and run the corresponding simulations in parallel via the API.

Access to latest generation CPUs – we now provide access to latest generation CPUs available on Google Cloud. So, besides the machines from the c2 and c2d families that we were already exposing in previous versions, we now provide access to several machines of type c3 and c3d, featuring the Intel Xeon processors with the latest generation architecture (Sapphire Rapids).

Much improved documentation – last but not least, we have totally revamped the API documentation)– making it simpler, more fluent and beautiful. We are using readthedocs to host it. Let’s get started!

We are very excited about all these features, so over the next few weeks, we will dedicate a few blog posts to dive deeper and provide examples of some of them. Stay tuned!

Check out our blog

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From Supercomputer to Cloud: A New Era for OpenFOAM Simulations

Inductiva joined the 1st OpenFOAM HPC Challenge to test how cloud infrastructure stacks up against traditional HPC for large-scale CFD simulations. Running the DrivAer automotive benchmark, the team explored multiple hardware setups, hyperthreading choices, and domain decomposition strategies. The results? Inductiva’s flexible MPI clusters handled up to 768 partitions with impressive price-performance—even outperforming pricier hardware in some cases. For simulations below massive supercomputer scales, cloud HPC proves not only competitive but cost-effective, offering engineers and researchers agility without sacrificing speed. Curious how to fine-tune your OpenFOAM workloads in the cloud? Dive into the benchmarks and see what’s possible.

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The Future of AI is Physical: Simulation is Key

Everyone’s talking about LLMs, but the real next wave is AI for the physical world—AI that understands fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and even quantum physics. From breakthroughs like DeepMind’s AlphaFold in protein folding to NVIDIA’s AI weather forecasting, industries from renewable energy to materials science are being transformed. But experimental data isn’t always enough; numerical simulations are crucial to generate high-quality datasets that power scientific AI. At Inductiva.AI, we’re offering a computational platform to democratize physics dataset generation, combining open-source simulators with cloud HPC, making it as easy as running a Python script. Explore how AI and scientific computing are converging—and what it means for the future of innovation.

Inductiva API v0.16 release

🔄 Real time Outputs, 💼 Smarter Projects, 🏷️ Metadata at scale, 🔒Private Simulators and two new ways to model the ocean 🌊 : What’s New in Inductiva.AI v0.16

We’re happy to share with our community Inductiva.AI v0.16, a powerful new release designed to help you organize simulations at scale, preserve context with metadata, and gain full control over your simulation environments. This version brings major upgrades to Project management, adds built-in metadata support, and now allows you to run your own private simulators securely. Plus, we’ve expanded our simulator catalog with two new engines for hydrodynamics and coastal modeling: OpenTelemac and Delft3D. Whether you're managing 10 or 10,000 simulations, this release helps you move faster, stay organized, and simulate anything — from river flows to molecular dynamics — on your terms.