By Mike Pearce, Ph.D., IDZ Server Community Manager
ANSYS, a world leader in simulation software, announced on March 12 that its premier engineering simulation software product, ANSYS* Mechanical APDL 16.0 (ANSYS Mechanical 16.0), will ship with built-in, optimized support for Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors.
Structural engineers and designers using ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 will be able to tap into the power and performance of highly-parallelized, multicore processing to speed engineering workloads, and at an affordable price.
ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 is a leading commercial Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software solution that enables engineers to test and validate a broad range of mechanical and structural design options using simulations. Precise modeling and simulations in structural engineering can greatly improve design productivity and shrink development costs and timelines by eliminating the need to build costly prototypes or perform physical testing in initial stages of design. The quality and flexibility of ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 simulations make it possible to predict end-product behavior and reliability by using iterative testing across a range of real-world scenarios.
When it comes to engineering simulations, speed, accuracy, power, and performance are what matter most. Engineers using ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 with Intel® Xeon® processors and coprocessors can now run much larger and more complex simulations faster, which enables engineers to test for detailed design variables without pushing product development timelines.
ANSYS Mechanical 16.0, optimized with the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, enables designers and engineers to get more simulation power out of their existing hardware investments. Using the multi-core Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 product family and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, based on Intel® Many Integrated Core Architecture (Intel® MIC Architecture), engineers can gain up to a 2.2X performance improvement for ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 in both Windows* and Linux* environments.[1], [2], [3]
Even higher performance gains are possible by upgrading from previous generation Intel hardware and adding a coprocessor. Gains of up to 3.1X were achieved for ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 DMP when upgrading from the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 family to the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 family and adding one or more Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.3
These are game-changing performance gains, with the ability to transform structural design and other High Performance Computing (HPC) workflows. The added power allows engineers to run more and larger simulations in less time to improve innovation, quality, safety, reliability, and time to market.
Tweet this: "#ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 co-engineered with #Intel #XeonPhi coprocessors: More than 2X performance gain intel.ly/1G5s7Vg"
Performance gains of this magnitude can only be realized through collaboration
Intel and ANSYS have worked together for many years, testing, optimizing and tuning code and hardware to deliver the highest possible performance for optimized bandwidth simulation workloads.
With ANSYS Mechanical 16.0, ANSYS has further parallelized and modernized its code and physics algorithms to take advantage of the latest generation of multi-core Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The result is a simulation platform that delivers significantly improved performance and efficiency for structural mechanics modeling, without complicating the IT environment.
Intel® Architecture Improves HPC Performance
The Intel® Architecture delivers improved HPC performance cost effectively, without requiring extensive code development, because Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors are designed to share computational workloads, optimizing performance.
The coprocessor also delivers substantially higher performance for highly parallel software, such as that found in ANSYS simulation applications. When a coprocessor is present, the optimized ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 software (which incorporates math processing routines via the Intel® Math Kernel Library) automatically offloads computationally intensive workloads from the CPU cores to the coprocessor. In turn, the Xeon Phi coprocessor performs these calculations quickly and efficiently and returns the results to the CPU. This reduces overall calculation time and accelerates the total simulation timeline.
Intel Xeon processors and coprocessors also share the same programming model, from languages, to tools and applications. Now engineers and designers can focus on “reuse” rather than “recode.”
Developers interested in programming Intel Xeon Phi cores can use standard C, C++, and FORTRAN source code. The same program source code written for Intel MIC Products can be compiled and run on a standard Intel Xeon processor. Familiar programming models remove training barriers, allowing developers to focus on the problems instead of software engineering.
Intel and ANSYS: A Tradition of Co-Engineering
ANSYS and Intel will continue to work together to deliver HPC simulation solutions that will help provide the highest performance and best value solutions.
You can make sure you get the full value of the latest ANSYS software advances by refreshing your server platform with the latest Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.
As an added incentive to ANSYS customers, Intel is offering for a limited time (through June 27, 2015), special pricing for Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors 3120A and 7120A. Quantities are limited. Click here to find out more.
For more information about combining ANSYS Mechanical with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, download this solution brief.
Tweet this: ".@ANSYS_Inc and #Intel collaborate to deliver simulation performance intel.ly/1G5s7Vg #HPC #ANSYS
[1] 2-socket Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2697 v2 vs. 2 socket Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2697 v3 + 1x Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7120 coprocessor running V15ln-2 DMP mode and 2 MPI processes with ANSYS Mechanical 16.0
[2] Source: Intel and ANSYS performance tests, October 2014. Previous-generation server configuration: 2 x Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2697 v2 (12 cores, 2.7 GHz, 8GT/s, 130W), 64 GB DDR3-1600 MHz memory (8 x 8GB), 1 x 600 GB SAS HDD storage, Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* Server release 6.5, ANSYS* Mechanical 16.0 DMP. New server configuration: 2 x Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2697 v3 (14 cores, 2.6 GHz, 9.6GT/s, 145W), 64 GB DDR4-2133 MHz memory (8 x 8GB), Intel® Data Center Solid-State Drive S35000 Series 800 GB, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.5, ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 DMP. Performance measured on each system with and without one Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor.
[3] Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark* and MobileMark*, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to http://www.intel.com/performance.
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