Latest News
September 1, 2006
By DE Editors
Industry News, Reports, and Items of Interest
Last month, HP introduced its new HP xw9400, a new high-end personal workstation built around top-of-the-line dual-core AMD Opteron 2000 Series processors. The xw9400, says HP, offers visualization and graphics performance features for CAE, scientific research, oil and gas exploration, and other compute-intensive environments.
The xw9400 can be equipped with single or dual Dual Core AMD Opteron 2000 series processors at speeds ranging from 1.80 GHz to 2.8 GHz and with 1 MB of L2 cache per core and 1 GHz AMD HyperTransport technology. The system provides AMD64 technology, enabling it to leverage 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit applications.
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| The HP xw9400 Workstation |
The HP xw9400 is available with preinstalled Windows XP Professional (32 or 64-bit), and it is Windows Vista ready. Support is also available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 4 (64-bit) as well as 32-bit or 64-bit Red Hat Linux, either pre-installed or through the supplied HP Installer Kit for Linux.
Capable of supporting up to 64 GB of memory and up to five SATA drives in addition to dual processors, the xw9400 mini-tower offers tool-less access and an expandable dual-socket chassis. It also supports a range of graphics, memory, and storage options, including serial-attached SCSI hard drives. The xw9400 provides special cooling and noise reduction features and I/O ports on the front of the chassis for easier access, cable routing, and peripheral placement.
The graphics performance of the HP xw9400, which can run dual displays, is built around the NVIDIA nForce Professional 3000 Series chipset, which enables dual PCI Express x16 graphics slots. With dual PCI Express graphics, you can run large models and display complex graphics with realism and speed, according to the company. The HP xw9400’s I/O performance includes dual PCI Express x8, dual PCI-X, and PCI slots. Graphics card options include the sweep of NVIDIA Quadro series boards.
Among its miscellaneous hardware specifications are three external 5.25- inch bays, five internal 3.5-inch bays, and an optional enclosure that enables a 3.5-inch SATA drive to be added to a 5.25-inch bay; high-definition audio; internal-chassis USB port suitable for application licensing requiring dongles and other such protections; two integrated 1394a ports and an optional 1394b port; two front-side and six backside USB 2.0 ports; and dual NVIDIA Gigabit LAN-On-Motherboard networking. Networking options include Broadcom 5751 NetXtreme Gigabit PCI NIC and Intel Pro/1000 GT Gigabit PCI NIC.
For details and to access the xw9400 datasheet, click here.
Contacts
HP
Palo Alto, CA
Engineous Software and Visual Collaboration Technologies Join Visualization Forces
Engineous Software, a provider of integration, automation, and design optimization software, has announced its partnership with Visual Collaboration Technologies, Inc. Through the agreement, Engineous and VCTI will integrate their technologies to bring VCTI’s common visualization platform, VCollab, into Engineous’ iSIGHT-FD multi-disciplinary design exploration system. Engineous has also joined VCTI’s distributor network as a value-added reseller to deliver the joint solution.
“The integration of VCollab’s 3D visualization capability and Engineous’ iSIGHT-FD provides our customers with exciting possibilities for automating the CAE workflow and for handling large CAE results files,” said Prasad Mandava, CEO and President of VCTI, “by automatically creating highly compressed 3D visual VCollab files from large multi-discipline analyses result files.”
“Engineous has partnered with a number of vendors to seamlessly integrate their software with iSIGHT-FD,” said Dr. Alex Van der Velden, VP, Engineering for Engineous Software.
Engineous Software, Inc. provides process integration and design optimization software solutions and services. The company’s iSIGHT software integrates key steps in the product design process, then automates and executes those steps through design exploration tools like optimization, DOE, and DFSS techniques. VCTI’s VCollab software is a multidisciplinary platform for CAD, CAM, and CAE visual collaboration. For more information, Visual Collaboration Techology or Engineous Software.
Contacts
Engineous Software, Inc.
Cary, NC
Visual Collaboration Techology
Troy, MI
Coraid’s EtherDrive Storage products use high-capacity disks and low-cost networking for massively scalable storage. According to a Coraid press release, networks are now economically feasible for many of today’s data-hungry applications. AoE enables disks to be shared on the network, creating a highly scalable storage system that costs less than $1 per gigabyte when using 750GB SATA disk drives. EtherDrive Storage is said to have the ability to scale one disk at a time to multi-PetaBytes of storage capacity.
Coraid’s EtherDrive Storage products offer 1U and 3U platforms that include internal RAID (0,1,5,10) capability for hot-swappable SATA1 or SATA2 disk drives. The driver is available for both Intel and PowerPC systems as a universal binary from 2°Frost.
Contacts
Coraid
San Clemente, CA
COMSOL, Inc. has released version 3.3 of COMSOL Multiphysics, its interactive system for simulating physical processes. In related news, the company also has released new discipline-centric modules that extend COMSOL Multiphysics into such specific areas as acoustics, low-frequency electromagnetics, and RF simulation.
COMSOL Multiphysics is COMSOL’s core platform for simulating physical processes describable with PDEs (partial differential equations). While optional modules add discipline-specific tools—such as chemical engineering, earth science, heat transfer, MEMS, and structural mechanics—COMSOL Multiphysics provides such functionalities as high-performance numerical algorithms, postprocessing capabilities, and model libraries that enable you to model most complex phenomena. Enhancements in version 3.3 as well as the new modules, says the company, expand the potential number of application areas addressed by COMSOL Multiphysics into virtually every field of engineering, science, and research.
Among the methodologies COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3 deploys are an expanded set of predefined couplings between common physics, including microwave heating, induction heating, rotating machinery, fluid-thermal interactions for laminar, nonisothermal and turbulent flow, and fluid-structure interaction. Your use of these couplings has been streamlined so that now you can menu-select a coupling that contains the correct physics, boundary settings, and couplings. You then modify the fields to meet the specific needs of the geometry. The simplicity of this operation, says the company, eliminates the need to possess an in-depth understanding of a complex problem’s underlying physics and problem structure.
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| COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3. |
A major addition to the COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3 user interface is the Model Tree. This window provides an overview of all aspects of a model, including variables, parameters, constants, and expressions, From the Model Tree, you can navigate, inspect, or modify any context-specific features and settings.
As you set up a model, Version 3.3 also offers a selection of solver choices. Each solver is fully aware of the mathematics and numerical schemes required to solve the multiphysics couplings. A new PARDISO solver provides a shared-memory parallel algorithm that’s applicable to such uses as large electromagnetic models.
COMSOL Multiphysics now supports both parts and assemblies throughout the modeling process. It not only recognizes an assembly’s components, it allows different materials for each component. Parts and their complementary physics can be coupled, and you can define internal border definitions such as contact resistance.
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| COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3. |
The interactive meshing environment in COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3 enables you to optimize the mesh for each part or model so that you can create a mesh in which each meshing operation acts on a set of subdomains. Further, you can apply different meshing techniques to local geometry objects. A new swept meshing tool lets you create prism (i.e., wedge) meshes and hexahedral (i.e., brick) meshes.
The COMSOL Multiphysics Structural Mechanics and MEMS modules now offer increased support for contact problems. Features include the ability to model heat flux, electric current, and species diffusion generated at or flowing across contact surfaces, with these conditions coupled to the material properties of the contact materials.
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| COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3. |
COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3 also comes with a material-property database with more than 1400 materials and 15,000 properties. This library can also accept files from the more than 59,000 material datasheets in the MatWeb material-property database.
COMSOL Multiphysics is available for the Windows, Linux, Solaris, and the Macintosh operating systems. A single-user license for COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3 costs $7,995. For additional licensing details, details about COMSOL Multiphysics 3.3, and its discipline-specific modules, visit COMSOL, Inc.
Contacts
COMSOL, Inc.
Burlington, MA
Mechanical Simulation Joins Software Partnership
Analysis of critical suspension designs can now be completed quickly, easily, and cost effectively thanks to SuspensionSim, a software product that can be used with CarSim from Mechanical Simulation Corporation. According to Terry Rhoades, Mechanical Simulation president, the product was developed by Knable & Associates, Inc.
“SuspensionSim gives engineers the capability to model almost any suspension system in a setting that rivals most testing facilities,” Rhoades said. “Then results can be imported directly to CarSim or TruckSim for immediate analysis of the suspension’s effects on vehicle dynamics.”
According to the company, SuspensionSim analyzes suspension systems for their kinematic and compliance qualities. The graphical user interface (GUI) and engineering layout allow for simple and quick model building and change evaluation. A variety of suspension templates provide a jump start in building user-defined models. The entire program is PC-based; files created in SuspensionSim can be directly imported by CarSim or TruckSim for analysis.
CarSim is Mechanical Simulation’s software package for simulating the dynamic vehicle behavior of cars, light trucks, and utility vehicles. CarSim animates simulated tests and generates more than 500 output variables that can be plotted and analyzed, including the “fish hook” test now required by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. TruckSim simulates the dynamic behavior of heavy-duty vehicles with dual wheels, asymmetric steering systems, multiple axles and single or multiple trailers.
For more information, click here.
Contacts
Mechanical Simulation Corp.
Ann Arbor, MI
Knable & Associates, Inc.
Brighton, MI
Extreme mesher also adds 64-bit support and Windows installer.
CEI announced a major new feature for fixing poor CAD geometry, 64-bit support, and a Windows installer for Harpoon, the extreme mesher developed by Sharc Ltd.
New wrapping technology developed by Sharc further improves Harpoon’s unique ability to deal with poor CAD geometry. In tandem with automated cleanup tools introduced in previous versions of Harpoon, the Wrapper feature quickly and easily takes care of large holes in models that cause problems when creating a mesh, says the company.
“This feature is extremely useful in applications such as underhood thermal management,” says Richard Bardwell, Sharc’s president, “where geometry is extremely complex, containing many holes, intersecting and overlapping surfaces, and in some cases, actual physical parts that might be missing.”
Harpoon’s Wrapper envelops CAD geometry within a single closed surface that can then be used to generate the final surface and volume mesh. This ensures a watertight, hole-free surface mesh, removing intersecting and overlapping surfaces and enabling automatic de-featuring of parts not required for the analysis.
The latest version of Harpoon now supports the Windows 64-bit operating system, providing the flexibility to use 32-bit systems for simpler meshes and 64-bit for more refined meshes. A new installer for both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows fully automates the Harpoon installation process. The latest version of Harpoon with Wrapper, 64-bit support, and the automated Windows installer is free to existing users. For more information, visit CEI. For trial versions, visit Sharc Ltd.
Frontline Systems is shipping Version 7.0 of its Premium Solver Platform for Excel and seven large-scale Solver Engines that plug into both the Premium Solver Platform and the Solver Platform SDK V7.0. Frontline’s products are upward compatible with the Solver in Excel and offer a solution for businesses seeking to allocate scarce resources using optimization technology.
The Premium Solver Platform V7.0 supports Solver models spread across multiple worksheets in a workbook, with decision variables and constraints on any worksheet. Different models can be defined on each worksheet, and each model can include variables and constraints on any sheet in a workbook. In Excel 2007, the Platform V7.0 supports Solver models with 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows—well beyond the 256-column and 65,536-row limits in previous Excel releases.
Now, unlimited solution reports are automatically wrapped and may be of virtually unlimited size, even in Excel 2000-2003. Report generation is typically 5-7 times faster for models of a few thousand variables, and faster for larger models.
When used with Frontline Systems’ new Risk Solver Engine V7.0, the Premium Solver Platform V7.0 can quickly solve simulation optimization problems. This is Frontline’s first step in a long-term effort to support optimal decision-making under uncertainty, using quantitative models in Excel.
Models can include random variables, defined by probability distributions, and formulas that depend on these random variables. Risk Solver Engine performs Monte Carlo simulation, with thousands of trials, on each change to the spreadsheet. Statistics for any uncertain formula, such as its mean and variance, Value at Risk, and percentiles, are available on the spreadsheet and can be used in the objective and constraints of a V7.0 optimization model.
These solvers can now deliver multiple solutions, not just a single best solution, for integer programming and global optimization problems. The best integer solutions (incumbents) for MIP problems, locally optimal solutions for global optimization problems, or best final-population members for non-smooth problems solved with the Evolutionary and OptQuest Solvers can be viewed in a worksheet report, or easily accessed in user VBA programs via the platform’s new object-oriented API.
Also new in the Premium Solver Platform V7.0 are optimization models defined via functions on the worksheet, Interactive Optimization, and a new, object-oriented API (application programming interface), accessible from Excel VBA. It matches the object-oriented API of the Solver Platform SDK V7.0, Frontline’s tool for optimization and simulation using modern programming languages such as C#, C++, VB.NET, Java and MATLAB. The new API makes it much easier to develop powerful custom applications in Excel, and to move applications from Excel to a programming language.
Price: $1,495 (single user license). Existing users of the Premium Solver Platform V6.5 with current annual support subscriptions will receive free upgrades to the new product version. For a limited time, special pricing on Risk Solver Engine V7.0 is available to users who are purchasing or upgrading to the Premium Solver Platform V7.0.
For more information and to download a free trial version of the Premium Solver Platform V7.0, visit Frontline Systems.
Contacts
Frontline Systems
Incline Village, NV
REvolution Computing Inc., James River Technical, Inc., and Rocketcalc LLC announced the availability of turnkey systems for high-performance statistical computation based on the RPro and NetworkSpaces software and the Rocketcalc Saturn line of personal supercomputers. According to a company press release, these systems improve accessibility of high-performance statistical computation to researchers, analysts, and engineers.
RPro and NetworkSpaces from REvolution Computing introduce the power of enterprise-class high-performance computation to the R statistical analysis system. The combination of the Rocketcalc Saturn personal supercomputer with RPro and NetworkSpaces places high-performance statistics computation within reach of individual researchers for the first time.
Systems are ready to run right out of the box, equipped with up to 16 AMD Opteron processor cores, 64 GB RAM, and 3 terabytes of internal storage, and backed by enterprise-class professional support, training, and service from REvolution Computing and James River Technical. The Saturn personal supercomputer is compact and quiet and can be powered from a standard wall outlet, making it suitable for use in the office, lab, and classroom.
James River Technical, Inc. is currently accepting orders for turnkey Saturn systems with RPro and NetworkSpaces. For full specifications and ordering information, please visit James River Technical.
Contacts
REvolution Computing, Inc.
Seattle, WA
James River Technical, Inc.
Richmond, VA
Rocketcalc, LLC
Kent, OH
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DE’s editors contribute news and new product announcements to Digital Engineering.
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