SGI Apps Engineering Solution Brief
®
SGI Apps Engineering
Solution Brief
Abaqus Unified FEA
®
SGI and Virtual Product Development
Abaqus Unified FEA
Leveraging high fidelity analyses with reduced
turnaround times and licensing costs.
Manufacturers are under increasing pressure to reduce
costs and increase quality throughout the entire design
cycle. The use of virtual prototyping design (VPD) software
and high performance computing (HPC) systems allows
manufacturers to validate a design before committing
to making expensive physical prototypes. SGI aids
manufacturers to maximize engineering productivity and
speed up the time to market.
Abaqus from SIMULIA, the Dassault Systèmes brand
for realistic simulation, is an industry-leading product
family that provides a comprehensive and scalable set of
Finite Element Analysis (FEA), multiphysics solvers and
modeling tools for simulating a wide range of linear and
nonlinear model types. It is used for stress, heat transfer
crack initiation, failure and other types of analyses in
mechanical, structural, aerospace, automotive,
bio-medical, civil, energy, and related engineering
and research applications
Most manufacturing companies execute Abaqus analyses
using application defaults while pushing high-fidelity complex
solutions to gain greater insight of simulations. The default
application settings work well for small departmental single
socket workstations but not for high-end compute cluster
technologies in HPC data centers.
To reduce turnaround times and licensing usage with
applications the SGI Apps Engineering team works closely
with Simulia to conduct tests to determine ways to reduce
analysis runtimes. The team finds simple changes to the
application and compute environment that can cut costs while
increasing computational efficiency of Abaqus executed in
HPC data centers.
Benchmark Model Example
Abaqus/Standard S4E, Cylinder head bolt-up, 16.7M
degrees of freedom (DOF) with 6 iterations. The S4E
benchmark model is a mildly nonlinear static analysis
that simulates bolting a cylinder head onto an engine
block. The S4E model is a compute-bound and memory
bandwidth limited example which is dominated by large
floating point operations per iterations 8.54E+13. The
majority of the compute time is spent in the solver.
Based on the benchmarks conducted the S4E chart
on the upper right shows a 21-36% improvement after
the SGI Apps Engineering Team tuned the Abaqus
application environment file and tuning the compute
environment. Further turnaround reductions can be
realized with enabling the Intel® Turbo Boost v2.0
processor feature in the compute environment.
50.0
100%
IntelTurboBoostDisabled
45.0
46.0
37.6
35.0
70%
34.2
30.0
21.1
33%
15.0
0.0
50%
26.6
20.0
5.0
60%
29.7
25.0
10.0
90%
80%
40.0
14.7
15.5
26%
40%
20.6
23%
26%
21%
TuningImprovement
FEA Multiphysics Problem
AbaqusS4EBenchmark
CylinderHeadBolt-up:16.7MDOF,12IteraEons,7.14E+14FLOPs/Iter
Abaqus2016resultsshowninJobs/Day(Higherisbe\er)
RaEng=NumberofJobs/Day
SGI offers a highly flexible framework of HPC servers,
software, storage, and services ideally suited for computer
aided engineering (CAE) workloads from multiple
disciplines. In addition, the company has a long history
of proven domain knowledge and key CAE application
expertise. All of these capabilities are supported by SGI
strong ISV relationships with software companies.
30%
20%
9.9
10%
(2)32Cores
(3)48Cores
(4)64Cores
(6)96Cores
(8)128Cores
0%
NumberofComputeNodes(n)CoreCount
2xE5-2667v3
3.20GHz8C&256GBMEM
NoTuning
2xE5-2667v3
3.20GHz8C&256GBMEM
Tuning
Tuning
Improvement
More detailed information can be found in the SGI Technology Guide
for Users’ of Abaqus, http://www.sgi.com/pdfs/4395.pdf
SGI Global Services offer a suite of support service plans,
hardware installation services, education and training, as
well as Professional Services to include custom consulting,
solution design, project management, staff augmentation,
and factory integration services worldwide.
Competitive Differentiation SGI focuses on providing
compute and storage solutions based on innovative
architectural advantages utilizing industry standard
components. By designing for performance, power,
density, and scalability, optimizing interconnections
between layers, and engineering to reduce overhead
and accelerate deployment, SGI solutions deliver
industry leading speed, scale, and efficiency.
SGI Apps Engineering Solution Brief
®
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Please contact an SGI sales representative at
1-800-800-7441 or visit www.sgi.com/manufacturing
Global Sales and Support: sgi.com
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