ANSYS and Intel worked closely together to optimize the first commercial engineering simulation package multi-core Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 and v3 families and the many-core Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor. Results indicate a 3.1x speedup after upgrading from a Xeon V2 to V3 solution, and a further 1.7x speedup when using an Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7120 coprocessor (or total 5.2x speedup over V2 Xeon). The partners note that even doubling performance can transform entire workflows, allowing design teams to run more and larger simulations in less time to improve innovation, quality, safety, reliability, manufacturability, and time to market.
ANSYS is the first commercial engineering simulation software provider supporting Xeon Phi technology. ANSYS 16.0’s structural mechanics suite supports Xeon Phi with shared-memory and distributed-memory parallelism for both the Linux and Windows platforms. Virtually all ANSYS users — including those who have access to clusters in which each compute node contains one or more coprocessors — can accelerate structural mechanics simulations using Xeon Phi coprocessors. For example, upgrading from the previous generation Xeon processor and adding one Xeon Phi coprocessor results in a decreased time to solution by a factor of 3.1 for ANSYS Mechanical™ simulations.
The combination offers tremendous new performance potential for structural mechanics simulations, at relatively low cost and without altering the end-user experience or complicating the IT environment.
ANSYS and Intel engineers ran benchmarks to measure the performance benefits across a mix of current and previous generation software and hardware (two-socket servers). The following results indicate the performance gains achieved in each upgrade scenario:
- Upgrade previous-generation hardware and add a coprocessor for up to 3.1x higher performance1,2. Gains of up to 3.1x were achieved for ANSYS Mechanical 16.0 DMP when upgrading from the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 family to the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 family and adding one or more Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.
- Add one or more coprocessors to a current-generation hardware/software platform for up to 1.7x higher performance1,2. Adding an Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor to a server powered by the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 family increased performance by up to 1.7x for ANSYS Mechanical 16.0. You can add an additional Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor for even greater performance.
(Image courtesy Intel)
For more information, see “Combine ANSYS Mechanical* with the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor for dramatic performance gains in both Windows* and Linux* environments”
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