Benchmark an ANSYS Model for Free

It's frustrating hearing “show me proof” when you suggest your outfit needs to invest in HPC (high-performance computing). Or maybe you're skeptical that HPC either in a cloud-based surge capacity or in-house can boost your productivity. Well, now's your chance to show the honchos and yourself some proof. It'll cost nothing.

Here's the scenario, then the challenge. You gotta get work done fast. Your products must be more reliable, more innovative, first to market and all that jazz. But simulations leave your workstation chugging like an '85 Yugo hemorrhaging oil. You might reduce fidelity to get results by tomorrow. Whatever. You're losing productive time, insights and exploration opportunities.

ANSYS, some of its HPC solution partners and Intel have teamed up to enable you to have one of your ANSYS models benchmarked for free, providing you the ability to determine whether a cloud-based or in-house HPC solution can improve your productivity. Image courtesy of ANSYS Inc.

Now, ANSYS designed its engineering solutions to scale beyond the limits of a typical engineering workstation so that they run on HPC clusters without fuss and quickly. ANSYS is certain that your ANSYS CFX, Fluent or Mechanical models will scale up and solve faster on a small HPC cluster than on your workstation.

They're so certain that they teamed up with a few of their HPC solution providers, including HP Enterprise, Advania, CPU 24/7 and X-ISS, as well as Intel to present the “Free ANSYS Performance Benchmark Program.” (Intel gets kudos for support that makes the program available without cost, according to ANSYS.)

The challenge for these outfits trying to convince you of HPC's productivity benefits is that HPC performance demos use standard benchmarks. Your simulations are unique, making it smoke and mirrors to you. So, rather than demoing standard benchmark models, you're challenged to have one of your own benchmarked.

How it works is that you upload one of your ANSYS models through a special, secure portal. A partner engineer will simulate your model on a small HP Enterprise HPC cluster. While they're doing that, you can whip out a timer and run it again on your workstation. ANSYS will send you the time/performance results of its HPC run. You can then compare the two sets of results to see the potential productivity gain you're missing. And you'll have something to show your bigwigs and yourself.

This sounds like a great idea. Except for a bunch of doubts, you have nothing to lose but much knowledge to gain. On Tuesday, November 7 (11 a.m. ET) an informational webinar will explore some of the ANSYS-HPC benefits and explain how you can participate in the “Free ANSYS Performance Benchmark Program.” Go here to register.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE