INDUSTRY

UGS Corp., a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced the availability of NX Nastran 4 software, the latest release of the company's premier software solution for advanced computer-aided engineering (CAE) and an integral part of UGS' overarching digital simulation strategy. In addition to a wide variety of functional enhancements, NX Nastran 4 significantly improves large model performance by exploiting the latest 64-bit computing technology and leveraging its industry leading PLM integration to maximize the value of CAE throughout the product development process. “Applying digital simulation technology earlier and more pervasively is one of the most important success factors in today’s advanced product development processes across many industries,” said Bruce Jenkins, managing partner, Spar Point Research LLC. “Having CAE capabilities available as an integral part of a comprehensive product development environment lowers the barriers to achieving this goal. The new functionality in NX Nastran 4 and its integration with the NX portfolio, promise to strengthen the competitive appeal of UGS’ overall offering in the CAE market and help customers continue increasing the business impact of CAE.” Leading performance for 64-bit technology With the release of NX Nastran 4, UGS has implemented a major improvement in memory management. NX Nastran now fully exploits the memory advantages of 64-bit architecture, enabling solutions for complex product performance simulations by taking full advantage of computers with large memory. This development builds on the NX Nastran leadership position for high performance solutions. Other advances in this release include extending the scalability and performance of NX Nastran parallel processing on cluster hardware systems, enabling solutions of very large models on up to 64 computers simultaneously – significantly boosting productivity. “UGS’ efforts to maximize CAE performance is well aligned with Intel’s focus on delivering leadership platform performance and software tools to our mutual customers,” said Paresh Pattani, director of HPC and Workstation Applications, Intel. “UGS’ use of Intel’s 64-bit Linux compilers in NX Nastran development and Intel’s Math Kernel Libraries for enhanced performance, are testaments to this alignment. Intel has been working closely with UGS applications for over eight years to improve performance and optimization and is now delighted to help deliver superior NX Nastran 4 performance on both the 64-bit Intel Xeon and Intel Itanium 2 platforms by providing early access to 64-bit Xeon platforms as well as remote access to our 32-, 64- and 128-node, 64-bit Xeon and Itanium 2 platforms/clusters for development, testing and performance optimization.” Robust functional enhancements complement industry’s tightest PLM integration In addition to exploiting the latest performance boosting hardware technology, NX Nastran 4 includes many customer-driven software enhancements. There are new physics capabilities such as rotor dynamics and advanced nonlinear (which now includes an explicit solver) that significantly expand the role of CAE within digital product development. In addition, NX Nastran 4 is more tightly integrated into the desktop environments of several of UGS’ digital product development applications – such as NX, I-deas NX Series, and Femap – and is more closely coupled with UGS’ Teamcenter PLM portfolio. This enhanced integration across the UGS product line enables customers to more easily take advantage of process-based vertical solutions, increasing the impact of CAE on shortening product development cycles, reducing costs and increasing profitability. “We have made significant progress advancing the performance and scalability of analysis with NX Nastran,” said Chuck Grindstaff, executive vice president, PLM Products, UGS. “Our development team is focused on delivering what matter most to our customers. In just two years since entering the Nastran marketplace, we have advanced the architectural foundation to leverage the most advanced multi-CPU hardware platforms. NX Nastran not only delivers the most enterprise value, it is also now the fastest solution available.” Customer-driven enhancements UGS actively solicits input from its customers to identify and prioritize the most desirable and highest value enhancements to incorporate into its software solutions. Based on customer input, NX Nastran 4 includes a variety of major enhancements in three primary categories. Performance improvements • Extensions to Hierarchic Distributed Memory Parallel (HDMP) solver – Improvements in distributed parallel solutions have greatly increased the performance for large complex models and now support dynamic response analyses. NX Nastran can solve a very large product performance simulation leveraging parallel processing with up to 64 computers. This can translate to major productivity improvements compared to competitive solvers. • Memory management improvement – NX Nastran 4 memory handling has been re-architected, dramatically increasing the amount of RAM that can be accessed to more than a million terabytes. Memory needs are now only limited by hardware systems. This will significantly improve the overall performance of large-solve scenarios and make possible solutions of large models that could not be performed previously. • Lanczos Eigensolver performance improvement – Improvements to the standard Lanczos Eigensolver can enable 15-25% reductions in solution times for large shell element dominant models. • HP-MPI technology is leveraged by NX Nastran across all applicable platforms, as a way of increasing scalable performance, robustness, and platform flexibility. Discipline extensions • Extensions to advanced non-linear solver – Added capabilities have increased the range of simulation applications by including more hyperelastic materials models, improving solution algorithms, and adding more non-linear element models. • Explicit non-linear solver – A new solver capability for efficient simulation of high-speed impact events and metal forming analysis is now available. • Rotor Dynamics – A new dynamic analysis capability that enables engineers to develop designs that operate away from the critical unstable operating speeds of rotating systems • Linear contact – A new capability allows users to perform fast and efficient surface-to-surface contact solutions for simulations that are otherwise linear. • Curved Beam Element Enhancement - Supports updated ASME boiler and pressure bessel code requirements for the design of flanged and mitered pipes. These guidelines are used extensively in nuclear, power generation, and chemical industries. • Modal Energy Method- A new modal energy output provides engineers with greater insight to understanding the dynamic behavior of their systems. “The implementation of the Modal Energy Method is clearly one of the highlights of the NX Nastran 4 release,” stated Manfred Wamsler, Daimler Chrysler AG. “Adding the Modal Energy Method to the extensive suite of existing NX Nastran evaluation tools is just one clear example of UGS’ responsiveness to its customers’ needs.” Process improvements • Enforced motion improvements – This extended capability for dynamic enforced motion simulation improves accuracy. • Temperature dependent modeling of composites – Latest enhancements support more accurate calculations of thermal loads on composite structures In addition to these functional enhancements, NX Nastran 4 continues the trend toward tighter integration within the entire UGS portfolio of PLM offerings and leverages the market strength that comes from being the standard solver for all of UGS’ applications. NX Nastran is an important part of UGS’ overarching digital simulation strategy to enable customers to implement their own best practices and increase simulation’s influence on design. NX Nastran 4 is being announced in conjunction with the launch of NX 4, UGS’ comprehensive software solution for digital product development.