You may recall my blog titled “From Supercomputers to Handhelds,” which discussed the concept of tablet computing capably running engineering simulations. As I mentioned, the tablet space is quickly evolving. My explorations continue on this subject today.
Looking back across time, technology advances have resulted in increased performance of computers relative to their size. When ANSYS was founded in 1970, finite element analysis (FEA) simulations were typically performed on large mainframes that filled entire rooms — these were the supercomputers of that era. Such large systems were necessary to run compute-intensive programs such as ANSYS software.
By the early 1990s, ANSYS simulations could be performed on personal computers (PCs). In those years, simulations on PCs were not nearly as large and complex as those being solved on larger servers, but PCs continued to evolve over time.
More recently, the distributed solver in the ANSYS Mechanical product family was developed to allow engineers to run FEA simulations on large clusters, which is the hardware of choice for today’s supercomputers. In fact, in 2008 several mechanical simulations were performed on one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world, using the Distributed ANSYS capability with calculations reaching over 1 Teraflop (over 1 trillion floating point operations per second).
Enough history. The purpose of this blog is to demonstrate that while ANSYS Mechanical software supports such speed and complexity required for the most numerically challenging and hardware-resource-intensive simulations, the power of a supercomputer is available in a device that fits into the palm of your hand. Continue reading →
If I had to choose a winner for the Best ACTor in 2012, It would be Oticon A/S in Denmark, a world-leading developer of hearing aids. I’ll tell you more about that company later. But first, let’s talk about ACTing and ACTors. ACT is ANSYS’ Application Customization Toolkit. It can help to capture analysts’ expertise and know-how as well as give non-expert users access to advanced models, among other things. But why is this tool so important?
