17 October 2008

A Dana engineering centre test track located in Arco, Italy. © Dana Holding Corporation.

American bureau R Systems, which provides supercomputing facilities to research operations in the public and private sector, has completed a benchmark test using Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008 and Abaqus finite element analysis (FEA) software supplied by the Simulia division of Dassault Systèmes. The test was run along with automotive component manufacturer Dana Holding Corporation.

“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, R Systems’ VP of business development. “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.

“We were extremely pleased by the outcome of the R Systems study,” said Frank Popielas, manager for advanced engineering in Dana’s Sealing Products Group. “The combination of flexible computing clusters and the power of parallel processing enabled by Simulia and Microsoft will result in significant time and money savings for Dana and the manufacturing industry as a whole.”

“Simulia is focused on optimising the performance of our robust and scalable simulation software for Windows HPC Server 2008,” said Steve Crowley, director of product management for Simulia at Dassault Systèmes. “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.”

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