ANSYS, a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimise product development processes, has announced the addition of large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems from HP that will enhance the company’s software research and development efforts. According to the company, the new HP is key to ensuring its continued leadership position in engineering software for HPC scalability.

Two HPC systems, totaling 76 server nodes with 576 cores, are being deployed to support today’s increasingly compute-intensive engineering simulation workloads. The systems include 28 HP ProLiant DL 165/160 server nodes located in the US and 48 HP ProLiant BL465c blade server nodes in Germany. The systems are based on quad-core processors from AMD and Intel.

The HPC systems provide ANSYS with the capacity and throughput needed for support of large-scale industrial problems being addressed by a wide range of ANSYS customers. “As our user community demands more and more from simulation, we implement greater depth and breadth into our multiphysics technology, which together provides functionality that mirrors the real world. These improvements require more computational resources,” said Jim Cashman, President and CEO of ANSYS.

Current engineering simulation problems can involve whole systems, meaning increasingly larger model sizes as product development teams include more geometric detail and consideration of full CAD assemblies. In addition, high-fidelity representation of complex physical phenomena — including time-varying treatment of turbulence, aero-acoustics, vibration and multiphysics — has dramatically increased the demand for computing capacity to support engineering simulation. HPC systems are essential to provide the capacity required for large models and to achieve the turnaround time required for engineering decision making, reducing tasks that might have taken weeks or months to days or mere hours.

The HP clusters deployed by ANSYS are being used for software tuning and performance testing, using large-scale industrial simulation workloads. “The new systems underscore our strong technical and commercial involvement with HP and provide us with outstanding ability to support our mutual customers,” Mr. Cashman added.