Altair’s New Benchmark Web site for RADIOSS Demonstrates Software Scalability, Repeatability & Compares Hardware Vendor Performance

Altair’s objectives for the RADIOSS benchmark program include:
1. Demonstrate the scalability and repeatability of RADIOSS on a variety of HPC platforms;
2. Provide customers better insight on the scalability of RADIOSS so that they can optimize their workload throughput; and
3. Allow hardware partners to promote their system performance on a standard suite of RADIOSS benchmarks using real-world models.

“Numerical simulations have to take up several challenges in order to answer the constraints of automotive projects. One of them is to shorten development delays and another is to reduce experimental tests and prototypes,” said Laurent Di Valentin, Numerical Simulation Expert, PSA Peugeot Citroën. “Therefore, we need powerful speed on High Performance Computing platforms in order to get results for crash models of 2 or more million elements in very short time. Altair’s new RADIOSS benchmark website should provide interesting prospective to these challenges.”

“RADIOSS is part of the HyperWorks platform and serves as its finite element solver hub, providing a comprehensive FEA solver for linear, nonlinear, multi-body dynamics, and fluid-structure interaction problems;“ reported Margaret S. Gurney, Desktop Engineering. RADIOSS is suitable for a complex range of physics problems including noise vibration and harshness, crash analysis, drop testing, ballistics, and explosions. The benchmarks currently available for download include four automobile crash tests. While the first benchmark tests are crash-simulation related, RADIOSS is used across a wide spectrum of domains and industries. Over time, Altair will be adding more diverse models for linear and non-linear FEA tests.

“Altair’s benchmark Web site for RADIOSS allows us to highlight its scalability, while providing customers a powerful tool to accurately size their computing systems, based on their specific requirements,” added Jeff Brennan, Altair vice president, Commercial Software. “The benchmark site also allows our hardware partners to demonstrate how RADIOSS performs on their computing hardware.”

Results of each benchmark test are delivered in an easy-to-use format using graphical visualization powered by HiQube™, enterprise analytics software. As a high-performance business intelligence & engineering intelligence engine provides industry-leading data visualization capability to the RADIOSS benchmark program for quick interpretation of data results.
IDC research shows a strong need for tests that better enable users to predict the performance of HPC systems on real-world applications, so users can make more informed, rational purchasing decisions, said Steve Conway, IDC vice president, HPC. The RADIOSS benchmark system is designed to do just that, by allowing users to see how RADIOSS performs on HPC systems from various vendors and by encouraging the vendors to enhance their products' performance over time.

Industry response to the program has been extremely positive, as it provides customers with proof points to the scalability of RADIOSS and a benchmark data that leads to predictable and repeatable performance of the software.