ANSYS High Performance Computing (HPC)

ANSYS HPC delivers cross-physics parallel processing capability for the full spectrum of ANSYS simulation software, supporting structural, fluids, thermal, and electromagnetic simulations in a single HPC solution. Buy once, deploy once, and get the most from your HPC investment.

Parallel processing with ANSYS HPC allows you to consider higher-fidelity models – including more geometric detail, larger systems, and more complex physics. The result is enhanced insight into product performance – insight that can’t be gained any other way. This detailed understanding can yield enormous business benefits – revealing design issues that might lead to product failure or troubleshooting delays. Using HPC to understand detailed product behavior, you can gain confidence in your design and ensure that your product will succeed in the market.

ANSYS HPC also increases throughput by speeding up turn-around time for individual simulations. This enables you to consider multiple design ideas and make the right design decisions early in the design cycle. Using ANSYS HPC you therefore make your engineering staff, and your product development process, more productive and efficient. With ANSYS HPC, you won’t be waiting for answers or making design decisions based on single point solutions.

Whatever your simulation need, ANSYS HPC provides the parallel processing capability you need to accelerate time-to-solution and solve your highest fidelity problems. The full portfolio of ANSYS solvers – including ANSYS Mechanical, ANSYS AUTODYN, ANSYS FLUENT, ANSYS CFX, ANSYS Icepak, and ANSYS POLYFLOW, – all use the same ANSYS HPC licenses to execute in parallel.

ANSYS HPC Packs
Enablers of high fidelity, ANSYS HPC Packs allow you to scale your use of HPC to whatever level your simulation requires. A group of ANSYS HPC Packs can be used to enable entry-level parallel processing for multiple simulations or combined to offer highly scaled parallel for your most challenging projects.

ANSYS HPC Workgroup
The Workgroup solution offers volume parallel to enhance the throughput of multiple simulations and improve the productivity of users within a single co-located workgroup.

ANSYS HPC Enterprise
The Enterprise solution provides volume parallel to support multiple users, with complete flexibility to deploy and use the software wherever you have distributed resources.

ANSYS HPC is tuned for optimum performance on the latest multi-core processors from Intel and AMD. Visit our published benchmarks and you’ll see 80-90% efficiency, or better, for single processor performance on a range of simulation workloads. ANSYS and our partners focus on issues like compiler optimization, process affinity setting, multi-core-aware partitioning, and cache tuning in order to ensure peak performance on each new generation of processors. Read more about the performance milestones achieved in ANSYS 12.0.

ANSYS Mechanical 12.0 Dual-Socket Quad-Core Performance. Intel Xeon 5472 (”Harpertown”)

ANSYS HPC delivers outstanding scaling. Our largest fluids benchmarks yield nearly linear scaling out to 2048 processors reducing turnaround time from hours or days to just minutes. Mechanical simulations can achieve teraflop compute rates on 100’s of processors. What’s the right scale for your problems? Depending on problem size, our customers typically use 32 to 128 processors for fluids, while more complex mechanical simulations will use 16 to 32 cores.

ANSYS FLUENT 12.0 Scale-Out SGI Altix ICE 8200EX – 2048 Cores

ANSYS HPC can tackle your largest simulations, solving problem with up to billions of elements for extreme high-fidelity simulation of complex geometries and small scale physical phenomena. Learn how yacht designers and Formula One teams take advantage of this scalable architecture to consider problems that were considered extreme just a few years ago.

With ANSYS HPC, you don’t need to be an IT expert or parallel processing guru. With a few simple menu picks, you can setup and launch ANSYS software to execute in parallel on your multi-core workstation or on a remote compute cluster. Everything you need to just install and start working, including MPI (Message Passing Interface) tools, comes bundled with ANSYS software.

ANSYS software is enabled to support load managers and job schedulers, including Platform LSF, PBSPro, and Microsoft Windows HPC Server. Using GUI panels and/or customizable scripts, ANSYS software can be integrated into your workload management environment with ease.

Air flow pathlines and pressure contours around a Formula One car Courtesy BMW F1 Team

ANSYS HPC provides parallel processing on a range of computing platforms. You can use ANSYS HPC on your multi-core workstation, substantially increasing throughput on single jobs. For workgroups or multiple job execution, clusters running Linux or Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 will provide scalable capacity and performance. Our MPI-based parallel processing supports gigE or Infiniband interconnects from a variety of vendors and the MPI tools you need come fully bundled with the software. ANSYS software is also Intel Cluster Ready (ICR) certified, ensuring smooth deployment and execution on ICR vendor solutions.

ANSYS has made a sustained investment in HPC software innovation, culminating in the performance you will see when you use ANSYS HPC solutions today. In fact, we’re well recognized in the HPC industry and our HPC partners invest in us to ensure best in class performance on their latest technologies. Most importantly, HPC is an ongoing focus area for ANSYS, so you can be sure that you’ll get the most from HPC technologies of the future. ANSYS are working now to enable simulations on 10,000 cores or more, with new innovative solver technologies, enhanced usability and scalability across the full simulation process.

Surface pressure on a sail, plus flow pathlines colored by local air velocity Courtesy Ignazio Maria Viola

ANSYS works with the leaders in HPC, including partners like Intel, AMD, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell, and other leading OEMs, resellers, technology vendors, and system integrators. Our technical collaboration with these partners ensures that you get the coordinated expert support you need at all phases of HPC deployment. From system specification to installation, tuning, troubleshooting and maintenance, our partners can help you minimize risk and increase the productivity of your HPC systems.