Fujitsu Paris offers ASP on hpcLine with advanced engineering codes

Saclay 23 May 2003 Fujitsu has a long history of supporting technical and scientific applications. In the Technical Computing Facility in Paris, the main applications in the field are benchmarked together with the Independent Software Provider (ISV) that develops the code. Goal is to understand the interface between application and machine and see how one or the other can be optimized. In the past year, many of the codes have been tested on the hpcLine. Fujitsu now also offers the applications on the hpcLine a VPP5000 and a Primepower server as Application Service Provider (ASP). This way one can test and even develop ones own applications using state-of-the art hard- and software.

One of the codes ported to the hpcLine is RADIOSS-CRASH SPMD of Mecalog. The code is too fain grain to perform well with FastEthernet. However, a 12-processor hpcLine with SCI interface and Xeon or Athlon processors outperforms a VPP5000. The Fujitsu hpcLine with SCI network is an official platform for RADIOSS-CRASH validation.

Another example is the close collaboration with the ESI group. ESI has several engineering codes, including PAM-CRASH, PAM-FLOW, and RAYON. ESI and Fujitsu Siemens developed a "turnkey" package with PAM-CRASH and hpcLine, which can be offered to customers of both companies. This was demonstrated for the first time at EuroPAM2002. ESI also purchased hpcLine for PAM-STAMP 2G development.

With Fluent, the porting experience to the hpcLine was similar to that as with RADIOSS. Fluent was supported on previous Fujitsu supercomputers so there was a good knowledge of the code. During porting it was quickly identified that FastEthernet scaling is limited, hence Fluent V5.7 and V6.0.20 were ported to the faster Scali SCI interconnect. PSA (Peugeot) did install a test hpcLine with Fluent.

A complete overview of the supported ISVs and their application is given in the next table.
PartnerApplicationField
MecalogRADIOSS-CRASHCrash
RADIOSS-CFDCFD
M-XPLOREStochastics
ESI GroupPAM-CRASHCrash
PAM-FLOWCFD
PAM-CASTCasting
PAM-STAMPStamp
RAYONAcoustics
SYSTUSStructures
LSTCLS-DYNACrash, stamp
Abaqus Inc.ABAQUS/StandardStructures
ABAQUS/ExplicitShock
MSC.SoftwareMSC.NASTRANStructures
MSC.MARCStructures
SamtechSAMCEFStructures
IntesPERMASStructures
Fluent IncFLUENTCFD
EXA CorpPowerFLOWCFD
CD adapcoSTAR-CDCFD
RicardoVECTISCFD
AVLFIRECFD
CFXCFXCFD
LMSSYSNOISEAcoustics
TNOMadymoSafety
EngineousiSIGHTOptimisation
EASiST-ORMStochastic
MagmaMagmasoftCasting
Alias/WavefrontMAYARendering

Application Service Provision is a new business of Fujitsu. The programme offers a flexible pay-per-use usage of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) applications on remote Linux clusters. Customers get Internet access over a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection for safe, encrypted data transfer. In general the servers of a customer are connected. This way overflow jobs can easily be executed by ASP resources.

This is useful for variable-load projects. There is no need to increase the internal compute capacity and be left a great deal of the time with unused capacity.

Fujitsu has developed a Java based graphical user interface that allows steering the computation directly from the client workstation in a mode Fujitsu calls Distributed Scalable Service Environment. Also application specific programming environments are under development.

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