Seriously Fast Solver
A structural analysis problem of the behavior of an airplane wing under bending with 500 million equations was solved in less than 18 hours (1,069 minutes), according to Chuck Grindstaff, chief technology officer of Siemens PLM Software (www. siemens. com/plm).
A structural analysis problem of the behavior of an airplane wing under bending with 500 million equations was solved in less than 18 hours (1,069 minutes), according to Chuck Grindstaff, chief technology officer of Siemens PLM Software (www.siemens.com/plm). Said Grindstaff, “Simulating the destructive wing-bending test is an especially important component of virtual product development in airplane manufacturing, and the 18-hour turnaround time provides a solution virtually overnight. As a result, our customers’ workflow process can proceed uninterrupted.”
What’s perhaps more astonishing is that this feat was performed with the current production version of the company’s NX NASTRAN software, not a special version. It was run on an IBM Power 570 server that contained eight POWER 6 cores at 4.7 GHz, 64 GB of memory and 24 148-GB capacity striped disks.
The finite element analysis (FEA) model solved consisted of 100-million girds along with some 98 million shell and 49 million solid elements. In addition to the 500 million equations, there were more than 600 million global degrees of freedom when a linear static analysis with a single load condition was executed.
According to Dr. Louis Komzsik, chief numerical analyst of Siemens PLM Software, “Today we can confidently predict that solving a one-billion equation problem will be feasible in the near future.” He added, “And with the demonstrated ability of NX NASTRAN to solve these huge problems, imagine how fast it can solve the more typical analyis problems encountered everyday by our customers, across a wide variety of industries.”
