Nissan Motor Company to migrate off-premise HPC workloads to Oracle Cloud

Nissan Motor Company has committed to moving its on-premise high-performance computing (HPC)-based performance and engineering workloads to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The motor manufacturer is prepping to migrate a mix of latency-sensitive workloads to Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as part of a push to speed up the design and testing process for its vehicles and, in turn, bring new cars to market more quickly.

Nissan relies on software-based computational fluid dynamics and structural mechanics simulations to test the external aerodynamics of its cars, and assess their designs for possible structural failures. These are run within an on-premise HPC environment.

However, the migration project will soon see these workloads hosted within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, so they can run on the database software giant’s bare-metal HPC offering instead.

Oracle claims to be the first public cloud provider to offer an HPC environment that is underpinned by an Intel Xeon-based bare-metal compute infrastructure with remote direct memory access (RDMA) cluster networking.

Nissan expects the move to improve the performance and efficiency of its design process, as it pursues a cloud-first strategy for its HPC requirements.

Oracle says the move also marks Nissan out as the first automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to make use of the graphics processing unit (GPU) technology within the Oracle Cloud for structural simulation and remote visualisation.

Bing Xu, general manager of the engineering systems department at Nissan Motor Company, said the firm is blazing a trail in the motoring industry with its willingness to embrace cloud-based systems for its large-scale HPC workloads.

“We selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s HPC solutions to meet the challenges of increased simulation demand under constant cost savings pressure,” said Xu. “I believe Oracle will bring significant return on investment to Nissan.”

Clay Magouyrk, executive vice-president for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said bagging Nissan as a reference customer for its HPC setup is a big endorsement for what its cloud platform is capable of doing.

“Our mission has always been to build the best cloud infrastructure for enterprises, including computationally intensive and extremely latency sensitive workloads that organisations like Nissan need to build the next generation of vehicles,” said Magouyrk.

Oracle’s most recent financial results saw the firm announce details of a number of similar customer wins it has secured for its public cloud infrastructure, with the firm reporting 140% year-on-year growth in the annualised consumption revenue generated by it during the fourth quarter.