OIL & GAS

The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, today announced support for the next-generation Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems with tantalizing early performance results. The Portland Group and Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC) have together produced a version of LS-DYNA compiled for AMD processor-based dual-core systems using the latest PGI Workstation 6.0 compilers and tools from The Portland Group. Evidence of the potential impact of dual-core processors has now been demonstrated using a version of LS-DYNA compiled with the PGF95 6.0 Fortran compiler. This version executes the topcrunch.org "neon_refined" data set in 8660 seconds on a Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor representing a speed improvement of greater than 30 percent compared to the previous best single- chip performance reported on topcrunch.org(1). The version used for these benchmark tests is based on the 5434a shared-memory parallel (SMP) version of LS-DYNA, which uses industry-standard OpenMP directives to explicitly divide work among multiple processors. The PGI compilers and tools support OpenMP directive-based parallelization and are capable of automatically parallelizing loops for dual-core processors or SMP parallel systems. LS-DYNA is an explicit, general-purpose multi-physics simulation software package used to model a wide range of complex real-world problems. Licensed worldwide by automotive companies and their suppliers to analyze vehicle designs, LS-DYNA is used to predict the behavior of vehicles in a collision and to study occupant safety. The end result is a reduction in the number of experimental test prototypes, saving time and expense in the design of new vehicles. "The day has arrived when every application needs to be parallel-enabled, either automatically or explicitly. Parallelizing compilers like those from The Portland Group are designed to efficiently make use of multiple cores, and together with the fully parallel-enabled PGI debugging and profiling tools simplify the task of porting, optimizing and deploying production applications for dual-core processors," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "We look forward to continuing to work with LSTC and other commercial application developers to help them fully exploit the capabilities of these powerful new processors from AMD." "LSTC has been developing parallel versions of LS-DYNA for the past fifteen years," said John O. Hallquist, president, Livermore Software Technology Corporation. "It is gratifying to see that these efforts will have significant and immediate benefits for our customers as dual-core processors become a mainstream technology in workstation, server and cluster systems." The PGI Workstation suite of Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and development tools are used widely in high-performance computing (HPC), the field of technical computing engaged in the modeling and simulation of complex processes, such as ocean modeling, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, bioinformatics and other areas. PGI compilers are recognized in the HPC community for delivering world-class performance across a wide spectrum of applications and benchmarks, and they are referenced regularly as the industry standard for performance and reliability. The Portland Group plans to introduce parallelizing compilers and tools that fully support AMD's dual-core processors on Windows and Linux in mid-2005. (1) Results based on timings submitted to TopCrunch as of February 3, 2005, where the previous best single processor result on the "neon_refined" data set took 12713 seconds to execute. The TopCrunch project was initiated to track the aggregate performance trends of high-performance computer systems and engineering software. Instead of using a synthetic benchmark, actual engineering software applications are used with real data and are run on high- performance computer systems. For more information on these results, please visit http://www.topcrunch.org/.