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Manufacturing

Dassault Systems Announces Completed Simulation Benchmark using Abaqus and Windows HPC

16 Oct, 2008

Company reports significant speed-up for Abaqus using flexible cluster configuration.


Dassault Systemes announced today that R Systems, a software product developer, in cooperation with SIMULIA and Dana Holding, has completed a simulation benchmark using Abaqus FEA software and Windows HPC Server 2008.

"With Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft has made huge advancements in performance and scaling that give users of realistic simulation solutions more IT flexibility," said Brian Kucic, vice-president of business development for R Systems. "Using the analysis model provided by Dana and the same 32-node compute cluster, we evaluated the performance of Abaqus FEA software on both Linux and Windows. Switching between the two operating systems was straightforward and the performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 was highly competitive."

Using 128 cores of a 256-core Intel Harpertown cluster with Quad Data Rate Infiniband, R Systems performed the benchmark study of a finite-element analysis model, provided by Dana, to evaluate distributed-memory performance of Abaqus FEA on Windows. The analysis, which normally takes a little over two days to complete, using eight cores, ran to completion in just under 3.5 hours, the company states.

"SIMULIA is focused on optimizing the performance of our robust and scalable simulation software for Windows HPC Server 2008," said Steve Crowley, director of product management for SIMULIA, Dassault Systemes. "R Systems provided excellent computing resources for our team to assess the performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 using Dana's model. We were highly impressed with the results and believe Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible by allowing our end-users to harness the power of distributed computing through a familiar Windows desktop environment."

According to Dassault Systemes, running Abaqus FEA software on a Windows-based cluster provides engineers with an integrated, efficient, and scalable high-performance computing platform for solving complex simulation and multiphysics analysis equations in less time by leveraging the combination of Abaqus distributed-memory parallel technology and Windows clustering solutions.