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Basic Building Block Performance
26 Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing— Altair Performance
8 Basic Building Block Performance
We tested the performance of systems created with Basic Building Blocks (BBB’s) for Altair AcuSolve,
Radioss, and OptiStruct. We tested performance on both a single BBB and a BBB couplet composed of two
BBB’s with a direct high-speed network connection. We tested with both RHEL Linux and Windows Server
2016 Enterprise Edition. For Linux, our results were obtained using an EDR network, for Windows, they were
obtained using a 25 GbE network, since this is how we envision customers using these systems.
Figure 16 shows the results we obtained for the Radioss benchmarks with the system configurations
mentioned above.
The results indicate that the Basic Building Blocks offer comparable performance to the EBB based building
blocks within a conventional HPC cluster running Linux using an InfiniBand network, when compared on a per
core basis. This appears to hold true for both the Linux and Windows based solutions. The smaller Neon
model has some performance limitations when run across the couplet, particularly with Windows, but as noted
above this model offers limited overall parallel scalability at higher core counts. A simple solution of BBBs
could be created such that modest jobs could be run on a single server and larger jobs run across the
couplet.
Figure 17 displays similar performance data for AcuSolve on the BBB.
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Neon Taurus
Performance Relative to 14G EBB
Figure 16: BBB performance for Radioss
Linux-1Node Linux-2Node Windows-1Node Windows-2Node