PUSHING ASIDE DATA BOTTLENECKS WITH A TURNKEY SOLUTION FOR SIMULATION DRIVEN ORGANIZATIONS

“Windows HPC Server 2008 brings the power of high-performance computing to wholly new segments of our markets while promising to decrease the operational cost in many well established environments.”Steve M. Legensky, General Manager at Intelligent Light

PARTNER PROFILE

Intelligent Light, located in Rutherford, New Jersey, provides computational fluid dynamics (CFD) post-processing and large data visualization capability under the industry leading FieldView brand, to thousands of HPC users in the aerospace, automotive and general manufacturing industries.

OVERVIEW

By accelerating how real-world phenomena are simulated, high-performance computing (HPC) has become an essential tool of modern engineering.

“Engineers’ appetite for improving their understanding and their design solutions is insatiable. Our customers continue to increase their reliance on simulation and high performance workflow.”

Steve M. Legensky, General Manager at Intelligent Light

SITUATION

Faster design simulations allow engineers to increase their productivity by conducting more accurate simulations, exploring more design candidates, and speeding fundamental research.

“Our customers are facing the need to accelerate their CFD simulation workflow by addressing the large data bottleneck stemming from rapidly increasing simulation fidelity, the growth of transient simulation, and the large volume of simulations.”

Roger R. Rintala, Strategic Marketing Manager, Intelligent Light

While HPC is now widely used to accelerate simulations, customers can further speed up their CFD simulations by reducing the data bottleneck with more productive post-processing. This involves using multipleusing multiple processors from their HPC server or multi-core workstation to address the bottleneck.

However, smaller organizations or engineering departments do not always have the dedicated IT resources or HPC expertise to deploy and manage clustering technology and distributed HPC applications. These customers need integrated HPC and HPC application solutions that are scalable, reliable, cost-effective, easy to integrate and use.

SOLUTION

Responding to these challenges, Intelligent Light offers FieldView Parallel post-processing software for Windows® HPC Server 2008.

“This joint solution for highly productive and easy to deploy CFD post-processing will help our customers effectively address the data bottleneck challenge.”

Roger R. Rintala, Strategic Marketing Manager, Intelligent Light

Windows HPC Server 2008 combines the power of a 64-bit Windows Server® platform with rich, out-of-the-box functionality to help improve the productivity, and reduce the complexity, of an HPC environment.

Windows HPC Server 2008 allows engineers to run their simulations in a familiar Windows environment, increasing the return on existing Windows-based IT infrastructure and expertise.

FieldView Parallel allows engineers to improve the capability, productivity, and impact of their CFD simulations and maximize their CFD investment.

FieldView Parallel enables the simulation data to remain where the simulation was run while the engineer works interactively or in batch operations from their workstation. This approach results in better decisions, products, and processes in less time and improved return on investment.

With FieldView Parallel and Windows HPC Server 2008 highly productive post-processing becomes a key advantage and large data bottlenecks are gracefully pushed aside. As a result, design engineers can focus more on their core research, and less on IT management.

FIELDVIEW PARALLEL

FieldView Parallel is powerful post-processing software to quickly identify important flow features and characteristics in CFD simulations. It allows interactive exploration for thorough understanding of simulation results.

The ability to save large amounts of time using FieldView Parallel can provide great productivity improvements for organizations facing post-processing related workflow bottlenecks due to the size and volume of their CFD simulation data.

With FieldView Parallel, your organization can:

Reduce turnaround time on large, multi-grid solutions. Use part of your HPC resources to post-process your solutions in a fraction of the time they would require using traditional, single processor approaches. Post-processing tasks that previously required hours may now be completed in minutes.

Increase throughput with concurrent post-processing. The use of HPC resources can also be applied to increase throughput with jobs running on fewer processors. For example, you can carry out multiple, simultaneous batch jobs, or perform concurrent processing of unsteady timesteps. These approaches can reduce a 16 hour animation production to just two hours.

Save time by leaving data where the solution was run. Moving data is time consuming and often impractical. Using FieldView in client-server mode allows you to work at your desktop while the solution data remains on the server. FieldView passes small amounts of data to the workstation and maintains lightweight network communication with the server when new data is required. This ensures fully interactive performance and a productive computing environment.

FURTHER INFORMATION

For more information about Windows HPC Server 2008 and HPC, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/hpc

For more information about Intelligent Light, please visit http://www.ilight.comwww.ilight.com

This data sheet is for informational purposes only. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

WINDOWS HPC SERVER 2008

Windows HPC Server 2008 helps enable adoption of HPC and increases productivity by providing numerous end-user, administrator, and developer features and tools, including:

• A rich and integrated end-user experience scaling from the desktop application to the clusters.

• Microsoft management tools that you can utilize to centrally manage the Windows Server infrastructure, including full support for command-line interfaces for administrators.

• Support for familiar development tools, such as the native parallel debugger in Microsoft Visual Studio®, to develop and troubleshoot parallel programs, including support for standard interfaces such as OpenMPI, Message Passing Interface (MPI), and Web Services.

BENEFITS

Windows HPC Server 2008 and FieldView Parallel provide a turnkey solution for CFD simulation. The benefits of this joint solution include:

Faster than before, more accurate CFD simulations. An integrated platform for HPC and CFD simulation means faster and more accurate than before simulations, dramatically increasing design engineer’s productivity.

Improved productivity and quality Faster, more accurate simulations mean that engineers spend much less time waiting for results which ultimately improves the quality of their products.

Utilize existing Windows expertise and IT investments. Interoperable Windows-based HPC and simulation software helps ensure that you can fully utilize your existing Windows-based expertise and IT investments, maximizing the return on your CFD and IT investments.

A typical Windows HPC Server 2008 architecture. The head node controls and mediates all access to the cluster resources, acts as the single point of management, deployment, and job scheduling for the cluster.