ACADEMIA

PathScale today announced that the Livermore Software Technology Corp. (LSTC) will be supporting the PathScale InfiniPath InfiniBand Interconnect with its newest release of its LS-DYNA software suite. LS-DYNA is used by academic institutions, defense agencies, and aerospace and automotive manufacturers to run complex modeling applications and simulations. The PathScale InfiniPath InfiniBand Adapter enables LS-DYNA users to obtain superior price/performance and greater scalability. In recently submitted TopCrunch benchmarks, the InfiniPath interconnect demonstrated that LS-DYNA deployed on commodity, AMD Opteron-processor based Linux clusters can scale to over 256 CPUs, offering similar performance to a Cray supercomputer for a fraction of the cost. TopCrunch is an online forum, organized by the University of California, San Diego, for posting benchmarks that track performance trends of high performance computer systems and engineering software. During the most recent TopCrunch benchmarking, the PathScale InfiniPath interconnect enabled LS-DYNA to run faster and scale higher than any previous Linux cluster. The TopCrunch results are available at its Web site. “Our results from the TopCrunch benchmarks are a testament to the fact that engineering driven companies can achieve supercomputing performance with commodity-priced AMD Opteron based clusters,” said Scott Metcalf, president and CEO of PathScale. “We’re looking forward to a successful relationship with LSTC. Together, we can offer unique high performance computing solutions that accelerate engineering breakthroughs, improve automobile and aerospace design and safety, and achieve faster returns on investments for our customers.” LSTC’s LS-DYNA plays a critical role in some of the world’s largest supercomputer installations and is used to simulate vehicle collisions, earthquakes and structural failures. The PathScale InfiniPath InfiniBand Adapter provides the lowest latency and highest messaging rate of any commodity cluster interconnect. This performance advantage allows engineers, researchers and scientists to increase the frequency of simulations and run larger simulations, dramatically improving time-to-market and time-to-results. “The price/performance improvements attributable to PathScale’s InfiniPath InfiniBand interconnect are very exciting to LSTC and, more importantly, to our customers,” said Dr. John Hallquist, president of LSTC. “Today, engineers working to simulate collisions, earthquakes, explosions and structural failures are continually challenged by the need for more cost-effective high performance computing systems. PathScale InfiniPath running on commodity Opteron servers provides one of the highest performance cluster solutions for running LS-DYNA.”