CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
November 14, 2005
Implementation Investments
Level 5 Networks Speeds Advancements in Computational Fluid Dynamics; FLUENT Inc., Leading Provider of CFD Software, to Showcase Level 5 Networks EtherFabric High Performance Interconnect Solution
Level 5 Networks, a developer of high-performance Ethernet network interface cards, announced that in tests done by Level 5 Networks its EtherFabric product was shown to accelerate FLUENT application performance by as much as 150 percent. The Level 5 Networks interconnect product has been benchmarked on the FLUENT computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software from Fluent, Inc., the worlds largest provider of CFD software and consulting services. The combined solution will help engineers in industries such as automotive, aerospace, power generation and biomedical shorten design cycles while reducing the number of IT resources needed to run the computations.
The broad physical modeling capabilities of FLUENT are applied to industrial applications ranging from air flow over an aircraft wing to combustion in a furnace, from bubble columns to glass production, from blood flow to semiconductor manufacturing, from clean room design to wastewater treatment plants. Level 5 helps all these calculations run faster, so that the end results can be obtained sooner, resulting in faster time to product creation and faster time to revenue.
"As the global leader in CFD software, Fluent works hard to provide software that is tuned to the latest HPC technologies," said Barbara Hutchings, director of strategic partnerships at Fluent. "Our customers are looking for every possible edge in time to market and cluster performance is critical. Level 5 Networks EtherFabric is a great solution, with demonstrated superior performance and minimal latency. By implementing EtherFabric, our customers may see their CFD calculations run in half the time they would normally run over Ethernet."
Tests conducted by Level 5 Networks have shown significant performance gains over conventional Gigabit Ethernet when running the FLUENT CFD application over Level 5 Networks EtherFabric. In the case of the FLUENT benchmark "FL5L3," performance doubled. The performance advantage continued to increase as the cluster size was increased, with the advantage limited only by the size of the cluster. To view detailed testing results, please visit www.level5networks.com.
"It's exciting to collaborate with industry leaders like Fluent to produce best-of-class solutions that accelerate innovation," said Dan Karr, chief executive officer of Level 5 Networks. "The combined power of Level 5 Networks EtherFabric and Fluent's CFD software gives customers the advantage they need to bring products to market faster and more cost effectively."
The EtherFabric Advantage
As an example of the real world advancements that Level 5 Networks and Fluent are bringing to bear, consider the automotive industry. Automobile companies used to take many years to take new a car from concept to the showroom and at least a year more before significant revenue could be derived from it. To stay ahead of competition, manufacturers are now trying to bring that down to one year. In order to achieve this ambitious objective, the automotive industry needs millions of hours of computing time required to simulate crash analysis and fluid behavior. Using Level 5 Networks EtherFabric interconnect solution and Fluent software, automotive manufacturers are seeing a significant increase in the speed of crash analysis and reducing the time required for fluid dynamics simulation.
In brief, EtherFabric provides the following advantages:
• Reduces application-to-application latency across the network
• Increases the usable network bandwidth that is available to applications
• Relieves network processing load on the server, resulting in more CPU power for applications
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