Solvers are the heart of Altair’s HyperWorks computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulation platform and the RADIOSS Implicit solution demonstrates high performance using a hybrid parallelization approach, significantly reducing the time needed for computer simulation analysis. The RADIOSS Implicit direct solver is employed extensively in structural analysis and sensitivity calculations, while the RADIOSS Implicit iterative solver is particularly suited to solving large engineering models with millions of degrees of freedom.

 

By offloading the intensive matrix computation from either of these two solvers onto Nvidia GPUs and using heterogeneous GPU and CPU computing, the solver’s speed can be increased significantly when compared to a multi-core CPU-only approach. Test results utilizing an Nvidia Tesla M2090 GPU have demonstrated up to four times faster acceleration in performance, as compared with the latest six-core CPU running the same simulation.

 

Users also benefit from accelerated access to compute resources in the cloud, thanks in part to GPU support by PBS Professional, Altair’s high-performance computing (HPC) workload management product.

 

Altair and Nvidia both discussed this hybrid parallelization technique during the SIGGRAPH 2012 exhibition.