According to principal engineer Prasad Raghavendra, Abaqus FEA software has been implemented into Azure HPC since 2015. By 2016, Redmond had fully migrated product level structural simulations for Surface Pro 4 and the original Surface laptop to Azure HPC from on-premises servers.
In the case of the aforementioned hinge, a graphic depicting its movement when a laptop is dropped and lands on a corner - as laptops tend to fall - allowed the engineering team to visualize the impact and stress levels experienced by its inner parts.
That dynamic drop simulation was executed on hundreds of cores of an Azure HPC cluster using Abaqus Explicit solver - the simulation tool used for brief transient and dynamic events like dropping heavy electronics or car crashes.
This enabled us to isolate the main issue and make the right design improvements," Ragavendra explained in an April 15 post. Because only one design iteration was needed, he noted that too.
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