ANSYS, Inc. announced the availability of an enhanced high-performance computing benchmark suite. Designed to guide customers who are adopting HPC systems for simulation, the improved benchmark suite has been used by ANSYS partners to assess performance of software from ANSYS on the latest HPC systems and technologies. The expanded HPC benchmarking suite includes a set of simulation models that are representative of the breadth and depth of ANSYS software capabilities.

The new benchmark suite provides updated simulation workloads for structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics, exercising a variety of simulation solution methodologies and addressing bigger simulation tasks, which increasingly have become the norm as engineering organizations tackle more detailed and complex simulations. The resulting performance data assists customers seeking to understand the benefit of HPC for specific simulation tasks and model sizes.

Including 15 simulation models in the mechanical modeling area and seven in the fluids modeling area, the suite provides customers with performance metrics for a variety of model sizes and solver methods, while reflecting the trend toward larger models and comprehensive multiphysics simulation. The posted results demonstrate the excellent performance scalability of software from ANSYS on the latest HPC technologies, including new quad-core processors from Intel and AMD, as well as the new ConnectX InfiniBand adapters from Mellanox.

The results reflect the ongoing research and development focus by ANSYS and its key partners concerning software performance on HPC systems, which yielded significant improvements to distributed memory parallel solvers and I/O speed in the ANSYS 11.0 and FLUENT 6.3 releases. The academic product portfolio from ANSYS, Inc. is based on three usage tiers: Associate, Research and Teaching. Each tier includes a range of products covering a variety of physics and more advanced coupled field (multiphysics) solver capability. In addition, Academic Toolbox products address high-performance computing (HPC) and specialized preprocessing concerns.

According to Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS, Inc., "The new benchmark suite is a reflection of our commitment to working with key partners in the HPC industry to optimize and demonstrate performance of our software on the latest computing technologies. This focus helps ensure that our customers can adopt new HPC solutions that enhance the overall value of simulation, by enabling faster turnaround time and larger, more detailed simulations. The combination of ANSYS software with HPC leads to a simulation process that can reliably impact engineering decision-making in the time frame our customers need. The new performance results show that HPC is now within the reach of all our customers, whether on the desktop, servers or clusters."

ANSYS designs, develops, markets and globally supports engineering simulation solutions used to predict how product designs will behave in manufacturing and real-world environments. Its integrated, modular and extensible set of solutions addresses the needs of organizations in a wide range of industries. ANSYS solutions qualify risk, enabling organizations to know if their designs are acceptable or unacceptable — not just that they will function as designed.