White Papers
23 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
4.4 ANSYS Mechanical
ANSYS Mechanical is a multi-physics Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software commonly used in many
engineering disciplines. Depending on specific problem types, FEA applications may or may not scale well
across multiple processor cores and servers. Specific types of FEA problems will benefit from GPU
acceleration, while other problems may not benefit. Implicit FEA problems often place large demands on
the memory and disk I/O sub-systems. Given the varying system requirements for different types of FEA
problems, benchmarking for ANSYS Mechanical was performed by using the Implicit, Implicit GPGPU, and
Explicit building block systems. The ten benchmark problems from the ANSYS Mechanical v17.0
benchmark suite were evaluated on the reference system.
The performance results for each individual building block types are presented in the following sections.
The results are presented by using the Core Solver Rating metric. This metric represents the performance
of the solver core which excludes any job pre- and post-processing.
Figure 12 shows the relative performance of the three compute building block types for the ANSYS
Mechanical benchmarks by using the DMP solver. For this comparison, all processor cores and GPUs in
the individual building blocks are utilized while running ANSYS Mechanical. For the V17sp-3 benchmark,
there is a known issue that results in poor performance when using GPU acceleration, so the results for
this benchmark are not reported. It is clear from this comparison that there is not a single best performing
server configuration for ANSYS Mechanical. The best server configuration for this application is highly
dependent on the specific simulation problem.
Figure 12 Performance of Individual Building Blocks—ANSYS Mechanical DMP
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1,000
V17cg‐1V17cg‐2V17cg‐3V17ln‐1V17ln‐2V17sp‐1V17sp‐2V17sp‐4V17sp‐5
CoreSolverRating(higherisbetter)
Benchmark
SingleSystemPerformance—ANSYSMechanicalDMP
ExplicitBB ImplicitBB ImplicitGPGPUBB