CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

23 March 2009

Company News

ANSYS Expands HPC Capacity for Enhanced R&D

ANSYS, Inc. announced the addition of large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems from HP that will enhance the Company’s software research and development efforts. The new HP solution expands the organization’s computing capacity and is key to ensuring the continued leadership position of ANSYS in engineering software for HPC scalability.

Two HPC systems, totaling 76 server nodes with 576 cores, are being deployed to support today’s increasingly compute-intensive engineering simulation workloads. The systems include 28 HP ProLiant DL 165/160 server nodes located in the United States and 48 HP ProLiant BL465c blade server nodes in Germany. The systems are based on quad-core processors from AMD and Intel.

The HPC systems provide ANSYS with the capacity and throughput needed for support of large-scale industrial problems being addressed by a wide range of ANSYS customers. “As our user community demands more and more from simulation, we implement greater depth and breadth into our multiphysics technology, which together provides functionality that mirrors the real world. These improvements require more computational resources. Today’s state-of-the-art systems are handling simulations of a size that we could not even imagine a few years ago. It is a critical area for continued research and investment by ANSYS,” said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS, Inc.

“Customers in the computer-aided engineering field are demanding high-performance computing systems that reduce the turnaround time of product development to maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace," said Ed Turkel, product marketing manager of the Scalable Computing & Infrastructure organization at HP. “HP’s industry-standard server technology combined with solutions from ANSYS ensures that customers have the high-performance systems they need to support large, more complex simulations with the throughput required.”

Current engineering simulation problems can involve whole systems, meaning increasingly larger model sizes as product development teams include more geometric detail and consideration of full CAD assemblies. In addition, high-fidelity representation of complex physical phenomena — including time-varying treatment of turbulence, aero-acoustics, vibration and multiphysics — has dramatically increased the demand for computing capacity to support engineering simulation. HPC systems are essential to provide the capacity required for large models and to achieve the turnaround time required for engineering decision making, reducing tasks that might have taken weeks or months to days or mere hours. With shortened turnaround times, engineers have more bandwidth to conduct simulation studies on multiple design points instead of conserving simulation horsepower and development time for one portion of the design puzzle.

The HP clusters deployed by ANSYS are being used for software tuning and performance testing, using large-scale industrial simulation workloads. “The new systems underscore our strong technical and commercial involvement with HP and provide us with outstanding ability to support our mutual customers. We expect the demand for large-scale simulation to grow, and these additional resources position us to ensure that we have the infrastructure and the foresight to drive areas of future opportunity for our customers,” Cashman added.

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