ANSYS Unveils GPU Computing for Engineering Simulations

By DE Editors

A new HPC solution developed by ANSYS leverages graphics processing units (GPUs) to reduce overall engineering simulation processing time by as much as half, according to the company.

The company's performance benchmarks demonstrate that using the latest NVIDIA Tesla GPUs in conjunction with a quad-core processor can cut overall turnaround time in half on typical workloads, when compared to running solely on a quad-core processor. ANSYS has worked with NVIDIA to develop solutions applicable to mechanical and electrical simulation, available now in a preview release. The full ANSYS accelerator capability is slated for general availability later in 2010.

Tesla GPUs are based on CUDA, NVIDIA’s computing architecture that enables its GPUs to be programmed using industry-standard languages. With power-efficient cores and increasingly fast access to memory, GPUs are suited to accelerate many ANSYS simulations. Benchmarking of the new ANSYS Mechanical implementation has shown that double precision computations of a typical workload can be performed on a GPU in around half the normal turnaround time, according to the company.

“This initial development for GPU computing demonstrates our focus on evolving ANSYS software to take advantage of important technology trends in high-performance computing,” says Dipankar Choudhury, vice president of corporate product strategy and planning at ANSYS. “We work to achieve optimized software performance, across the full spectrum of HPC technologies, so that our customers get maximum value from their investment in HPC. Here, our technical collaboration with NVIDIA has resulted in a significant benefit for our mutual customers.”

For more information, visit ANSYS and NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.