Sun shows excellent performs on PAM-Crash

 Portland 15 Nov 99 At Supercomputing 99, Sun Microsystems, announced impressive new performance numbers for PAM-CRASH simulation software from ESI Group on Sun Enterprise 10000 servers running the Solaris Operating Environment. The tests show that running the simulations on multi-processor E10000 servers provides superlinear improvements in elapsed time for job completion.

The top-of-the-line Sun Enterprise 10000 (popularly known as the Starfire) server can be configured with up to 64 processors. The system used in these performance tests was fully configured with 64 400 MHz UltraSPARC CPUs with 8 MB of e-cache per processor. Sun ran test cases on PAM-CRASH V97-D using both Sun MPI 3.0 and public domain PVM versions. Performance scaled well on both versions, but as the number of processors increased to more than 40, PAM-CRASH scaled higher and faster with the Sun MPI 3.0 implementation. The large 245,000-element test case, running on one processor, took 702,000 seconds (about 8 days) to complete with the standard PAM-CRASH V97 code release. On 48 processors with PAM-CRASH V97-D and Sun MPI 3.0 it required only 14,070 seconds (less than four hours) to run -- almost 50 times faster.

A second test case, with 52,000 elements, ran in 69,580 seconds (about 19 hours) on one processor. With eight processors, the job ran 8.9 times faster, in 7,819 seconds, or about 2 1/4 hours. In addition, performance continued to show significant speed up all the way to 62 processors, with the job completing in 1,582 seconds -- less than half an hour. "The 44X improvement in performance with 62 processors is quite impressive," said Jan Clinckemaillie, head of the HPCN & Advanced Applications group at ESI Group. "We haven't seen as much 62-processor speed-up on any other platform for this case." PAM-CRASH simulation software from ESI Group is used worldwide by manufacturers, especially auto makers, to perform virtual crash testing on new vehicles. Required by law, crash tests are expensive and can result in the need for significant re-work of product designs. With crash simulation software, manufacturers can detect and correct potential problems on virtual prototypes before doing expensive "live" testing. Simulation also gives improved safety and can shorten time-to-market in addition to lowering the overall cost of developing a new product.

 

Ad Emmen

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