ANSYS Inc., taking its cue from the growing number of companies adopting high-performance computers to conduct more complex simulation studies, has come out with a new benchmarking suite to assist in the buying process.
ANSYS’ enhanced high-performance computing (HPC) benchmark suite is designed to guide its customers who are in the market for HPC systems to evaluate how well the ANSYS software will perform on a particular hardware platform. The suite provides updated simulation workloads for structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and has also been tuned to deliver performance metrics on larger models and multiphysics simulations — both important trends among engineering customers performing simulations.
The expanded HPC benchmarking suite includes a set of simulation models representing the breadth of the ANSYS software; these include 15 simulation models in the mechanical modeling area and seven in the fluids modeling area, officials say, along with providing customers with performance metrics for a variety of model sizes and solver methods.
Performance results for the benchmark suite have been generated by AMD, Intel, Mellanox Technologies and others and reflect the performance of ANSYS software on the latest HPC technologies, including new quad-core processors from Intel and AMD and the ConnectX InfiniBand adapters from Mellanox. The OEM partners take the ANSYS standard test cases and run them on their latest hardware platforms and report back with the performance results. ANSYS then takes these results and posts them on its website, according to Barb Hutchings, who coordinates strategic partnerships at ANSYS.
“Customers really do pay attention to this,” Hutchings says. “Certainly when a customer is looking to procure a very large hardware system, they start at least by looking at these standard benchmarks. They may go forward and put a request for proposal or have the vendor run their customized benchmark, but this is a common starting point.”
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