ANSYS Inc is one of the foremost leaders in software for engineering simulation – and its Ansys Fluent and Ansys LS-DYNA applications are now generally available on Arm. These tools are used in industry to develop products from full aircraft and cars down to the component parts such as turbine blades and batteries.
Complex physics require huge computations – oftentimes hundreds of servers running for many hours, and across multiple variations of the designs.
The speed of simulation is therefore critically important to Ansys’s customers. An engineer can assess more iterations of a design when more simulations can be run during their working day. Costs can be significantly reduced by faster simulation – from achieving more from software licenses to the cost and carbon footprint of the hardware used.
The recently launched AWS Graviton4-based (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/) Amazon EC2 instances – built using Arm’s Neoverse V2 cores and system IP (https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/neoverse/neoverse-v2) – are a snapshot into the performance that Arm partners can deliver to industry. In this blog, we demonstrate the performance that they deliver on Fluent and LS-DYNA software.
In these benchmarks, we examine single-server performance. Multiple server performance is affected by choice of networking software and hardware - and is in essence orthogonal to the choice of server processor.
The hardware platforms were
Ansys Fluent is a versatile computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool that includes well validated physical modeling capabilities to deliver fast, accurate results across a wide range of CFD and multiphysics applications. It is widely used in automotive, aerospace, academia, oil & gas, marine and Formula 1 racing. Typical workload sizes range from two million to 500 million cells.
Aerodynamics simulation is essential to enable aircraft to fly or cars to be more efficient, for example. If we consider helicopter design - this requires massive models to simulate the rotor air flow interaction and the entire airframe where its parts are touched by external air. There is a natural and complex interplay between the fuselage and rotors as the rotors rotate. Better simulation enables quieter, safer and more efficient flight.
The benchmarks selected were from the Ansys benchmark suite (https://www.ansys.com/en-gb/it-solutions/benchmarks-overview).
Ansys LS-DYNA is the industry-leading explicit simulation software used for applications like drop tests, impact and penetration, smashes and crashes, occupant safety, and more. LS-DYNA is used in the automotive, aerospace, construction, facilities, military, manufacturing, and bio-engineering industries..
For LS-DYNA, we use the two standard cases that are widely used to benchmark its performance:
Whilst performance is close on the smaller test case, we see that the larger, and more typical, ODB-10M demonstrates at +12% time advantage from running on AWS Graviton4.
The performance of latest generation Arm silicon demonstrates the potential for engineering companies to make a significant increase efficiency in their design processes.
Fluent and LS-DYNA are amongst the most widely used engineering simulation software packages in industrial HPC – and now support Arm architecture servers. In addition to supporting AWS Graviton3 and Graviton4, engineers can deploy both packages on other Arm platforms – such as NVIDIA and Ampere in on-premises data centres, or in AWS, Microsoft Azure, AliCloud or Google Compute Platform in the Cloud.