Inductiva API v0.4 release

Hugo Penedones

Author

Luís Sarmento

Author

February 9, 2024

Tags:

Inductiva APIProgrammingHPCSimulationMPI
Inductiva API v0.4 release banner

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

Collaborative Insights Inductiva + MotoStudent FEUP

Engineering the Future of Racing: How cloud-based HPC accelerates design

At Inductiva, we are committed to supporting academic teams that are tackling real-world engineering challenges through simulation. MotoStudent FEUP, a student-led team, is building an electric racing motorcycle for the MotoStudent Electric competition, a project requiring advanced CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to analyse how aerodynamics would affect the motorcycle’s speed, stability, and structure.

V0.17 Inductiva banner

Benchmarks, Security, Scalability and Alerts

Lots of improvements on this v0.17 release: some are “invisible”, but mission critical, such as the platform improvements on security and scalability, others you will notice right away, such as the new awesome Benchmarks Dashboard or the Tasks’ System Metrics. Below, we’ll dive deeper into how to use these features to help you run simulations more efficiently and cost-effectively, and also breakdown when and why to use each of them.

Group of fishing boats floating on calm water

Embracing Uncertainty in Fisheries Science with IPMA - ​​Portuguese Institute for the Ocean and Atmosphere

In this edition of Collaborative Insights, we’re proud to share a project developed with Rui Coelho, Principal Investigator at IPMA (Portuguese Institute for the Ocean and Atmosphere). Rui and his team used Inductiva’s cloud-based HPC platform to dramatically accelerate their work in stock assessment modeling for the South Atlantic shortfin mako shark—a species whose conservation depends on rigorous science and timely insights.