OCF, ANSYS and Lenovo Deploy HPC Appliance

OCF, ANSYS and Lenovo have built an high-performance computing (HPC) appliance that is preconfigured for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The device offers plug-and-play functionality with two dual-socket compute nodes.

This technology has 24/7 availability and intelligent job scheduling. According to OCF, it can offer up to six times improvement in engineer productivity over a single workstation.

“We’ve come across lots of engineers using workstations and laptops to process their ANSYS CFD simulations which restrict use of their device, even for email, until the job is complete,” says Andrew Dean, HPC business development manager, OCF. “The users we speak to are also unsure when their jobs will finish - it could be after a couple of hours or half a day. The job could finish in the middle of the night when they‟re unavailable to start a new action. Plus, of course, the job might even have crashed, they wouldn’t know. The appliance shifts simulation jobs off local workstations to a central resource enabling engineers to truly multi-task. The appliance, complete with job scheduler, enables maximum utilization of the appliance with the possibility of submitting jobs 24/7.”

For more information, visit OCF.

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