NVIDIA GPUs Will Help with Engineering Simulations

NVIDIA continues to be serious about getting every possible application to take advantage of GPU computing, and its latest success has now been made known.

The Santa Clara, California-based company just announced that MSC Software Corporation launched a GPU-accelerated version of the MSC Nastran 2012, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) application.

This program is utilized in many engineering simulation tasks and can now benefit from the high parallel processing capabilities of graphics chips.

In fact, both single-GPU and multi-GPU configurations are supported.

“With support for single- and multi-GPU acceleration, MSC Nastran 2012 allows users to significantly reduce simulation turnaround times, create more high-fidelity simulations, and improve design quality,” said Andrew Cresci, general manager of strategic alliances at NVIDIA.

“We are expanding our joint development with MSC to include GPU acceleration of complex math kernels, allowing us to address NVH and large dynamics problems for our customers.”

The GPU-accelerated MSC Nastran 2012 should work about up to 5 times better than before and produce higher-quality simulations, with more realistic models and such.

Thus, both spacecraft and aircraft design breakthroughs should be more readily achievable.

“GPU-enabled performance improvements have the potential to transform engineering analysis and design-optimization procedures,” said Dr. Ted Wertheimer, senior director of product management at MSC Software.

“CUDA-based GPU acceleration in MSC Nastran 2012 will speed up performance by 1.5-5x for a range of models and industries, helping customers improve their workflow and deliver better products to market, faster.”

MSC Nastran 2012 is most useful in simulations with solid elements (engine structures and such) and is compatible with both Windows and Linux operating systems.

NVIDIA's Tesla series of graphics processing units, and adapters based on them, are the incarnation of the NVIDIA GPU and CUDA technologies that the software tool will end up drawing upon.

Go here to learn more about this integrated, Multidiscipline FEA Solution.