Manufacturers are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and increase quality throughout the entire product design cycle. The use of virtual prototyping software like Abaqus and high-performance computing (HPC) systems from SGI®, allows manufacturers to validate the structural integrity of a design before committing to making expensive physical prototypes.
SGI aids manufacturers to maximize engineering productivity and speed up the time-to-market, offering a highly flexible framework of HPC servers, software, storage and services ideally suited for CAE workloads from multiple disciplines. In addition, SGI has a long history of proven domain knowledge and key CAE application expertise. All of these capabilities are supported by the company’s strong technical relationship with SIMULIA.
To that end, SGI has published the SGI® Technology Guide for Users of Abaqus. This guide is intended to help customers make knowledgeable choices in regards to selecting HPC hardware to optimally run Abaqus software. The guide reviews the performance of Abaqus executed on three types of SGI platforms: the SGI® Rackable® cluster, the SGI® ICE™ XA cluster and the SGI® UV™ 3000 Shared Memory Parallel (SMP) platform.
In addition to presenting performance results on these three supercomputing platforms, it discusses the benefits of using multicore Intel® processors, the trade-offs of different network topologies, NVIDIA® compute GPU device performance and the use of SGI® MPI PerfBoost. Also included are sizing guidelines and recommendations for HPC platforms running Abaqus.
The Abaqus models selected for this guide are included with each Abaqus release. Using common data sets provides a way to characterize system performance on various platforms to allow general performance comparisons.
