ANSYS, Inc., a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced that the upcoming ANSYS 9.0 release will be ported to the AMD Opteron processor running the SuSE version of the Linux operating system. The AMD Opteron processor allows companies to preserve their investments in 32-bit applications, while providing a transition path to 64-bit computing for those projects demanding high-performance capabilities. "With design cycles shortening, users want the highest-performing processors to keep up with their increasingly intense software needs," said Ben Williams, vice president of AMD's Enterprise and Server/Workstation Business Segment. "By porting ANSYS software to the AMD64 platform, ANSYS users will have the power and speed to quickly create their simulation runs and be unhindered by processor limitations." In addition to being extremely fast, future ANSYS 9.0 customers who purchase systems based on the AMD Opteron processor will find it very cost effective. Plus, with the AMD Opteron processor price performance, customers using ANSYS products as their distributed domain solver or probabilistic design system may want to consider clustering their machines to run distributed processing applications. Currently, the newly released ANSYS ICEM CFD and AI*Environment 5.0 is ported to the AMD Opteron processor platform enabling customer to access more than 2GB of memory, and thus, tackle problems of almost unlimited size. Additionally, ANSYS CFX-5.7 has been tested on AMD Opteron processor-based systems under both Windows and Linux, and has shown excellent stability and performance. Together, CFX-5 and the AMD Opteron processor have shown linear parallel scalability in Windows-based x86-class workstations. The next major release of CFX-5 will support the large memory access provided by the 64-bit capability of the AMD Opteron processor. "Customers who try ANSYS on the AMD64 platform should be pleased with both the price and the speed at which they can run their design calculations on their systems," said Mike Wheeler, vice president and general manager, Mechanical Business Unit at ANSYS, Inc. "We realize the importance of having optimal performing systems to maximize the capabilities of our software, and we're committed to helping facilitate that."