Sun Announces
Outstanding
Design Analysis
Performance
Results on CSAR
CSA/Nastran
Significant Speedups And Multi-threaded Processing
Yield Faster Design Analysis Results.
PALO ALTO, Calif.- Sun Microsystems,
Inc. today announced the availability of a new version of
CSAR's CSA/NASTRAN tuned specifically for Sun's
UltraSPARCTM II processor. The new port yielded significant
performance speed-ups; internal performance tests run by
Sun show that customers running CSA/NASTRAN Version
98 on Sun systems with the SolarisTM operating environment
can expect to complete their single-thread complex finite
element analysis problems two to five times faster than with
CSA/NASTRAN Version 97.
"With this new tuned port, CSAR gains the benefits of the
Solaris environment's unlimited file size and multi-threaded
operation, along with UltraSPARC-specific performance
enhancements," said Kelly Perey, director of technical
computing market development at Sun. "CSAR's focus on
analysis makes them an important player in the mechanical
computer aided engineering market, and we are pleased to
see the excellent results we've achieved with their software
on our platform."
"CSA/NASTRAN on UltraSPARC II processor-based
systems will enable engineers to conduct large scale
structural analyses easily and in a timely manner, reducing
the time needed for critical design iterations," commented
Peter Schartz, director of computer services at CSAR. "We
observed significant computing power and I/O throughput in
our own benchmark testing, that puts the UltraSPARC II
version at or near the top of its class in all the analysis
categories we tested.
"The port of CSA/NASTRAN Version 98 to the UltraSPARC II
architecture was among the easiest ports that the Computer
Science team has ever done," continued Schartz. "The
application development environment, and the compilers in
particular, proved very robust and yielded a high performing
application with minimal tuning required. "The CSAR
Computer Science team utilized the SunTM Performance
LibraryTM technology to enhance the floating point
performance of CSA/NASTRAN Version 98 and found it to
be of significant benefit.
CSA/NASTRAN is a large scale Finite Element Analysis
(FEA) package, used extensively by major automotive,
aircraft, and spacecraft companies worldwide, as well as
their suppliers, a wide number of governmental
organizations, and a variety of other engineering groups.
Finite element analysis is used during the design of products
and components to determine that the design can meet
required deformation, stress, vibration, and temperature
specifications. FEA can reduce product costs significantly
because it identifies critical areas that carry the bulk of
stresses caused by deformation or vibration, as well as
helping to identify areas in which a material reduction may
be
possible. The number of prototypes required before finalizing
a production version of the design can usually be reduced,
which also lowers product costs.
In internal performance tests run by Sun, CSA/NASTRAN
Version 98 for Sun's UltraSPARC II platform outperformed
Version 97 by an average of 300 percent. On a
customer-provided dataset, one suite of tests ran five times
faster in Version 98. A large modal analysis ran two times
faster. These were production models that required
significant compute and I/O resources to solve. In addition,
Version 98 is enabled for multi-threaded processing through
calls to the Sun Performance Library.
The performance tests were run on a SunTM HPC 6500
server with 30 336 MHz UltraSPARC II processors, each
with 4 megabytes of external cache. The HPC 6500 server is
one of four new supercomputing-class servers recently
introduced by Sun. These servers are aimed at customers
running compute-intensive applications in high performance
midrange technical environments. The Sun HPC 3500, 4500,
5500 and 6500 servers, running the Solaris operating
environment, address the needs of technical, floating
point-intensive customers by offering exceptional
performance, scalability, and availability.
CSAR Corporation is a privately held company
headquartered in Agoura Hills, Calif. Its products,
CSA/NASTRAN, CSA/GENSA and CSA/Visual, are used by
major industrial companies throughout the world.
About Sun Microsystems,
Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular
vision, "The Network Is
The ComputerTM," has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc.
(NASDAQ: SUNW), to its position as a leading provider of
high quality hardware, software and services for establishing
enterprise-wide intranets and expanding the power of the
Internet. With more than $9 billion in annual revenues, Sun
can be found in more than 150 countries and on the World
Wide Web at http://sun.com. @Macarlo, Inc. @Macarlo's Shareware & Web OS/2 Java Lobby Member
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