Simulation software sets record

Lifestyle simulation software sets benchmark in its category by solving a 200 million degrees of freedom model - claimed to be the largest and fastest known calculation of this type.

UGS has announced that NX Nastran has set a benchmark in its category by solving a 200 million degrees of freedom (MDOF) model - claimed to be the largest and fastest known calculation of this type.

"This breakthrough extends our leadership in high performance computing," said UGS Chairman, CEO and President Tony Affuso during his keynote address at the Daratech Summit 2006.

"NX Nastran is a core element of our lifecycle simulation strategy to enable real-time simulation across the product lifecycle".

"We expect NX Nastran to solve problems up to a billion degrees of freedom in the near future".

"Its scalability and speed significantly improve productivity for our customers, enabling faster idea validation and accelerated innovation".

The analysis was conducted to simulate the behaviour of a wing structure under shear load conditions.

NX Nastran executed the linear static analysis of a 200 MDOF model that was comprised of over 34 million quadrilateral shell elements and about 35 million node points.

The solution was obtained in seven hours during which 4.2Tbyte of I/O was processed using eight processors in shared memory parallel paradigm.

The highest amount of memory used was 20Gbyte and the disk space required was 971Gbyte.

The analysis was executed on an IBM System p5 570 with 16 Power5+ processors running at 2.2GHz with 128Gbyte of DDR2 memory.

The 1.4Tbyte scratch file system was striped over 19 internal 15,000rev/min disks.

By combining several of the machines into a cluster and using NX Nastran's distributed numerical technology known as hierarchic distributed memory parallel (HDMP), the company says NX Nastran will be able to solve similar problems up to a billion degrees of freedom in the near future.

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