Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

August 12, 2008 — In order to compete in today's global economy, you need powerful tools to help you develop innovative new products in shorter time frames, with fewer prototypes. HyperWorks from Altair Engineering, Inc., running on Sun systems, can help you manage and optimize virtually every aspect of the development cycle and help you make engineering decisions earlier, thus reducing product development times, reducing prototyping costs, and producing higher quality products.

Altair HyperWorks and Solver Technology

Altair is a global software and services company focused on data analysis, visualization, and high-performance computing, offering enterprise technology to analyze, optimize, and visualize information in business and engineering. Altair HyperWorks is a suite of enterprise analytics applications based on an open architecture that includes statistical, database, visualization, and simulation software. It is the leading simulation-driven design solution for product development across the world's top corporations. The availability of other Altair and partner tools under the same simple, pay-for-use licensing program delivers more than 40 software solutions, enabling you to cost-effectively leverage the tools you need without excessive licensing fees. And, with its open architecture, HyperWorks offers broad interoperability with commercial CAD and CAE solutions for greater flexibility and efficiency.

Sun and Altair share a long history of collaborating to offer innovative, powerful solutions to help companies develop new products. Sun is also an active sponsor of HyperWorks Technology Conferences. For years, engineers have run HyperWorks on UNIX and SPARC desktops with solvers running on larger SPARC systems in the back-end. To offer more choice and multinode support, Altair recently finished porting its HyperWorks solver solutions to the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) on x64 platforms. Ported HyperWorks solvers include:

• RADIOSS, a next-generation implicit and explicit finite-element solver for linear statics and dynamics as well as complex nonlinear transient dynamics and mechanical systems simulation
• OptiStruct, an award-winning CAE technology for conceptual design synthesis and structural optimization, which helps develop lightweight, structurally efficient design concepts early in the design cycle
• MotionSolve, a robust mechanical system simulation solver supporting solutions for statics, quasi-statics, kinematics, and dynamics

HyperWorks, based on models' sizes and complexity, can require massive parallel computation delivered by high performance computing (HPC) clustering or large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems. Now you have the choice to leverage the price/performance and energy-efficiency of Sun's x64 systems in HPC clustering configurations, or the sheer power (up to 256 cores) of long-supported, larger SPARC systems.

Solaris OS on x64 systems — outstanding price/performance for HyperWorks Solvers and HPC

Known for its incredible performance and throughput, the Solaris OS is an ideal platform to run highly multithreaded RADIOSS solvers, OptiStruct optimizations, and MotionSolve simulations in HPC clusters. Leveraging more than 20 years of SMP expertise, Sun has tuned and optimized the Solaris 10 OS for the AMD Opteron platform to deliver exceptional performance and near-linear scalability. Dozens of performance and price/performance world record benchmarks demonstrate this exceptional combination. Sun and AMD software engineers work jointly on a range of codevelopment efforts including future development of HyperTransport, compiler performance, and other ways Solaris can take advantage of the AMD Opteron architecture.

Sun also works closely with Intel to bring Intel's open source Threading Building Blocks support to the Solaris OS to help optimize multicore performance on Intel Xeon processor-based systems. In addition, the Solaris OS supports Intel Enhanced SpeedStep for CPU power management, which increases performance, saves power, and reduces heat. Solaris OS support for these two Intel features delivers more solver performance when you need it and saves energy when the solvers are idle.

Manage Your HPC Environment

Sun xVM Ops Center is a complete, highly scalable datacenter automation platform designed to scale for demanding HPC environments to help manage dense physical server farms and large virtual server pools.

Sun and Altair

Working together, Sun and Altair can help you build and manage an HPC environment for RADIOSS, OptiStruct, and MotionSolve so you can rapidly make the right decisions to reduce product development times, reduce prototyping costs, and produce higher quality products — to get a step ahead of the competition.

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Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops technical marketing communications for the technology industry.