NVIDIA GPUs Accelerate SIMULIA’s Abaqus FEA Solver

NVIDIA and SIMULIA, the Dassault Systèmes brand for Realistic Simulation, have collaborated to deliver the power of GPU computing for Abaqus customers. Available in the Abaqus 6.11 and Abaqus 6.12 releases, NVIDIA GPU acceleration enables faster results for more efficient computation and job turnaround times, delivering more license utilization for the same investment.

Innovate Faster with GPU-Accelerated Abaqus FEA:

> Abaqus 6.12 for structural response simulations

SIMULIA Community News, June 2012: Multi-GPU Support in Abaqus 6.12 (page# 15)
NVIDIA Press Release: Dassault Systèmes Accelerates Computer-Aided Engineering by Using NVIDIA GPUs

> Abaqus presentations at the GTC 2012 and NAFEMS 2011 World Congress:

Acceleration of SIMULIA's Abaqus Solver on NVIDIA GPUs by Acceleware, Ltd.
Evolving Use of GPU for Dassault Systemes Simulation Products by SIMULIA
Accelerating Commercial Linear Dynamic And Nonlinear Implicit FEA Software Through High-Performance Computing by SIMULIA and Acceleware, which shows a range of models and related speed-ups

Performance studies conducted together with SIMULIA engineers demonstrated that:

With Abaqus 6.11, the Tesla M2070 GPU acceleration of an Intel Xeon 5680 (Westmere) CPU with 2 cores provided speed-up greater than 2.6x and for 4 cores greater than 2x (as shown in the below chart on the left);
With Abaqus 6.12, the multiple GPU (Tesla M2075) acceleration on 2 nodes (with 24 Westmere CPU cores) is in the range of 1.3-2x depending on the model sizes.

Source: Abaqus 6.12 Overview, Eric Weybrant, Product Manager, SIMULIA

Recommended Professional Products

The powerful GPU computing capabilities in Abaqus were developed on NVIDIA Tesla and Quadro GPU computing products and require the use of recent CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPUs, such as the Tesla 20-series products, and supporting CUDA v3.1 or above (learn more).

Tesla and Quadro GPU computing products are designed to deliver the highest computational performance with the most reliable numerical accuracy, and are available and supported by the world's leading professional system manufacturers.

Tesla Benefits

Highest Computational Performance
> High-speed double precision operations
> Large dedicated memory
> CUDA-Accelerated math libraries
> High-speed bi-directional PCIe communication
> NVIDIA GPUDirect™ with InfiniBand

Most Reliable
> ECC memory
> Rigorous stress testing
> Abaqus QA testing

Best Supported
> Professional support network
> Large and growing developer community
> OEM system integration
> Long-term product lifecycle
> 3 year warranty
> Cluster & system management tools
(server products)
> Windows remote desktop support

Recommended Configurations

Workstations
> Existing System

Tesla C2075 (6GB)

> New System Purchase

Total 2 CPU sockets; recommend 1 GPU per CPU socket ;
Total 48 GBs of CPU memory or more;
Disk with minimum 500 GB

> GPU OPTIONS

Tesla C2075
Quadro 4000 for pre/post

OR a single GPU

Quadro 6000 for compute and pre/post

Servers/Clusters
> New System Purchase

Each node with

2 CPU sockets (6 to 8 cores each); recommend 1 GPU per CPU socket
Total 64 to 192 GBs of CPU memory
Disk with minimum 2000 GB (scratch)
2 x Tesla M2075 or Tesla M2090

NVIDIA Tesla and Quadro products are available from all major professional workstation OEMs. Only Tesla GPU computing products are designed and qualified for compute cluster deployment.

Buy Optimized Tesla Systems

NVIDIA partners with system vendors to provide optimal solutions that accelerate your HPC workloads. Buy now and enjoy all the benefits of GPU-acceleration on SIMULIA Abaqus.

For a complete list of Tesla Preferred Providers, click here.