INDUSTRY

HP and leading computer-aided engineering (CAE) software vendors, engineers, and managers will gather at “The 15th Annual HP Symposium on Technology Trends in Computational Engineering” to review and discuss trends in engineering simulation, including how the computing standardization trend reduces costs and increases agility in the automotive industry. “The critical business need to reduce time-to-market drives all areas of product design and development, which is why high-performance servers, clusters, workstations, and CAE software applications are in such high demand,” said Scott McClellan, chief technical officer for HP’s High Performance Technical Computing Division. McClellan is one of the two keynote speakers at the symposium and will speak on “HP’s Adaptive Solutions for CAE.” The second keynote speaker, Dr. David E. Cole, chair of the Center for Automotive Research, will speak on “The Auto Future: It’s the Law of the Jungle.” “The auto industry,” explains Dr. Cole, “is in the midst of a major ‘survival of the fittest’ transformation that will result in significant vendor consolidation. Survival depends on being lean, agile and reducing costs, and high performance product development is one of the keys to achieving this. Virtual prototyping provides huge savings in time and money and the ride is just beginning. We’re undergoing a technology revolution in the auto industry.” The one-day symposium features representatives from 20 prominent CAE software vendors speaking on topics such as Unified Finite Element Analysis, Metal Forming, Aeroacoustics, CFD for Internal Combustion Engines, Multidisciplinary Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and CAE Integration and Process. “Our strong technical and business partnerships with CAE ISVs enhance the productivity gain required by our customers. Our commitment to providing the best CAE solutions is illustrated by our consistency in delivering this annual CAE symposium for 15 years,” said McClellan. HP, which has the largest portfolio of CAE application software in the industry, has worked for over a decade with ISVs porting and optimizing CAE software to excel on HP systems. For example, HP Integrity servers outperform competing server architectures on major CAE application benchmarks, such as Ansys, Nastran and Abaqus. Faster performance results in greater engineering productivity and improved time-to-market The ISVs attending the symposium support HP’s complete product portfolio, the broadest in the industry, including the new HP Workstation c8000, designed to address the most demanding workloads in automotive, aerospace, and electronic design enterprises. Featuring advancements in processor, graphics, chipset and cooling technology, this new generation of RISC-based HP workstations enables UNIX workstation users to design and analyze products more quickly and affordably than before. HP, the market share leader in the high-performance technical computing segment and number one vendor on the Top 500 Supercomputer list for four years running,(1) offers the broadest suite of 32-bit and 64-bit industry-standard systems for CAE, including Itanium 2-based Integrity servers and clusters running Linux or HP-UX and ProLiant Xeon and Opteron-based clusters running Linux. This complete range of open architecture systems provides the foundation for an open environment that helps CAE users reduce costs, simplify change and improve agility in their product development processes. HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy helps reduces costs, simplifies change, improves agility in CAE According to HP’s McClellan, the company’s strategy is to leverage the cost/performance benefits of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies, and provide added value in the system design and layered software. “Standardization is central to the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy and essential for increased business agility,” said McClellan. “At the same time, HP is an innovative technology company and delivers unique data center management tools, superior cluster interconnects, and outstanding visualization systems.” In the CAE market segment, innovation in data management is as important as innovation in computation. To address data management needs, HP offers solutions in storage, data Grids, and global file systems (Lustre). A highly scalable, shareable, open, parallel file system for Linux, Lustre will significantly increase I/O performance and decrease storage costs. HP also delivers advanced computing interconnects. HP InfiniBand optimizes clustered HP Integrity servers running HP-UX for high-performance technical computing markets. InfiniBand’s low latency and very high bandwidth are crucial for the performance of compute-intensive and message-passing applications for technical computing customers. HP is the first major vendor to release InfiniBand solutions for UNIX platforms. For visualization, the HP Visualization Center sv7 and emerging Sepia (scientific/engineering visualization) systems bring a new level of affordability to rendering CAE post-processing images for large-scale visualization in design reviews. HP strongly believes in the power of collaboration in developing best-in-class technologies and furthering innovation. HP has formed the HP Collaboration and Competency Network (HP CCN) to ensure that emerging standards and technologies meet the demanding needs of the high-performance technical computing community. The HP CCN is a forum to facilitate wide-ranging collaboration, innovation and competency sharing between HP and customers and partners. The initial HP CCN collaboration areas include Linux on Itanium (Gelato), computational and data grids, global file system for Linux (Lustre), scientific visualization (Sepia), and Linux SMP scaling. (1) “High Performance Technical Computing Qview, Q42003,” International Data Corporation (IDC). A complete listing of TOP500 Supercomputer sites, released in November, 2003, is available at www.top500.org.