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Altair Feko Performance
23 Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing— Altair Performance
7 Altair Feko Performance
Altair Feko is a comprehensive computational electromagnetics (CEM) solution used widely in the
telecommunications, automobile, aerospace and defense industries. Feko offers several frequency and time
domain EM solvers under a single license. Hybridization of these methods enables the efficient analysis of a
broad spectrum of EM problems, including the analysis of antennas, microstrip circuits, RF components and
biomedical systems. Feko also enables computation of antenna placement on electrically large structures, the
scattering from large structures as well as electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) investigations.
Figure 13 show the performance of a generic sedan model at various frequencies, which use the full wave
method of moments (MoM), when run on various solver computer servers.
Full wave electromagnetic models require substantial memory to run when using this direct full wave MoM
solver. Feko also has very memory efficient methods like UTD or PO or RL-GO (computations on the fly).
Only the MoM solver used here requires that much memory. For these benchmarks, the E5-2697Av4
processor-based server had 128GB of memory, the 6136 based server had 384GB of memory, the 6142
server had 768GB of memory, and the 62xxx servers all had 192GB of memory. As expected, the simulation
run times increased as a function of input mesh size. There was insufficient memory available on some of the
servers to run all of the benchmarks models. The benchmarks were also carried out on a 6142 based server
equipped with 192GB of memory and the performance difference between the 129GB and 1768GB servers
was similar, indicating the amount of system memory does not have a measurable effect on performance.
Figure 14 shows the performance speedup obtained when carrying out these benchmarks over multiple 14G
EBB servers.
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Sedan_700 Sedan_850 Sedan_1100 Sedan_1200
Run time in seconds
Figure 13: Single System Performance—Feko Sedan (MoM)
E5-2697v4 6136 6142 6242 6248 6252