ANSYS Expands HPC Benchmarking Program

ANSYS, Inc. (Nasdaq: ANSS), a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced the availability of an enhanced high-performance computing (HPC) 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 new benchmark suite provides updated simulation workloads for structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), 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.

The expanded HPC benchmarking suite includes a set of simulation models that are representative of the breadth and depth of ANSYS software capabilities. 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.

Performance results for the suite of benchmarks have been generated by AMD, HP, Intel, Mellanox Technologies and other partners, and they are available on the ANSYS Web site at http://www.ansys.com/benchmark. 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(R) 11.0 and FLUENT(R) 6.3 releases.

"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," said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS, Inc. "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."

Intel used the new ANSYS benchmark suite to demonstrate the performance of its Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor 5400 series, released in November 2007. "ANSYS has set a high standard within the computer-aided engineering (CAE) industry for HPC benchmarking and reporting," said Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Organization. "The new benchmark suite provides a reliable and consistent methodology to measure the performance of our latest platforms. Our close collaboration with ANSYS on benchmarking, tuning and optimization enables ANSYS to take full advantage of Intel's latest processor capabilities and to deliver innovative product releases that provide customers with exceptional value."

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