96-core HPC Cluster Delivers Higher Performance than a 512-Core Proprietary Supercomputer According to TopCrunch Performance Tracking Website

Mellanox Technologies, Dell, Intel Cluster Ready and LSTC, have announced record application performance for LS-DYNA Automotive Crash Simulation, one of the auto-industry’s most compute-demanding application for automotive design and safety. The LS-DYNA 3-Vehicle Collision benchmark was tested on a Dell PowerEdge M610 cluster with Intel Xeon X5670 processors and Intel® Cluster Ready architecture with networking provided by Mellanox ConnectX-2 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters and an IS5030 36-port 40Gb/s InfiniBand switch. Results from 48-core and 96-core sizes show that the combined solution delivers the world-leading performance versus any given system at these sizes, or versus larger core count systems based on Ethernet or proprietary interconnect solution based supercomputers.

“Decreasing the time it takes to simulate car crashes provides auto manufacturers with faster time-to-market and less cost associated with the overall design phase,” said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “These benchmark results are a clear indication of the performance benefits of our end-to-end 40Gb/s InfiniBand networking products and the overall return-on-investment they bring to the automotive engineering community.”

“LS-DYNA is widely used in the automotive industry for crashworthiness, occupant safety and metal forming, as well as for aerospace, military and defense and consumer products,” said Dr. Wayne Mindle, Sr. Engineer, at LSTC. “These benchmarks significantly show that engineers and designers in many industries can gain world-leading simulation performance benefits when running LS-DYNA on top of Intel-based Dell servers with Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand networking.”

“Dell high-performance computing solutions help solve some of the most challenging computational intensive tasks facing engineering and scientific communities,” said Donnie Bell, senior manager, HPC product marketing at Dell. “By integrating the latest advances in CPU and server architectures, as well as leveraging high-speed InfiniBand interconnects from Mellanox, and innovative software such as LSTC’s LS-DYNA, Dell's HPC solutions deliver break-through performance and simplicity based on industry standard components.”

“Engineering teams seeking to improve their simulation performance get strong benefits from these technologies and the Intel Cluster Ready architecture contributes to rapid deployment and a trouble free software environment,” stated Richard Altmaier, Intel Cluster Ready director of marketing and business development.

The performance testing was performed at the HPC Advisory Council High Performance Center. The center provides users and vendors with a unique capability to design, develop, test and qualify solutions for the HPC market. The center, located in California, operates 24/7 and provides secure remote access to its users.

“We have established the High Performance Center to enable collaboration between vendors and users to provide faster, better and more productive solutions to the high-performance computing user community,” said Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council Chairman. “We are pleased to see the center fulfill its role and help vendors demonstrate how widely-available commodity-based systems can deliver higher performance versus more expensive proprietary solutions.”