ANSYS HPC simulation appliance, 'engineer ready' supercomputing

We’re building an appliance theme in today’s news. I missed this when it was announced last month, but UK-based Dezineforce has announced that they are selling an HPC appliance designed for the “missing middle” of the HPC market.

The appliance puts ANSYS simulation software installed and ready to run on hardware from Dell, all pre-integrated into a hardware+software package that customers can order ready to plug in

ANSYS develops engineering simulation software used to predict how products will behave in real-world environments. The Dezineforce HPC simulation appliance for ANSYS is delivered truly engineer-ready, requiring no local HPC management or configuration expertise. Pre-integrated ANSYS software enables engineers to work with familiar tools with the added benefits of HPC performance and scalability. Additionally, Dezineforce simulation manager tools optimise simulation scheduling and provide transparent control over multiple parallel simulations, making the most efficient use of available hardware and license resources.

…Dezineforce CEO George Shanks adds: “We developed the Dezineforce HPC simulation appliance for companies who need to improve design team productivity by doing more simulation work faster or developing more efficient designs. Pre-integration of ANSYS in our HPC environment allows engineers to be performing faster solves within an hour of installation. The compute power at their fingertips means complex simulations are executed quickly and efficiently allowing the design team to focus on improving product performance, which can yield enormous business benefits.”

Note that the web site mentions that Microsoft is involved too, and the only way I can think of for that to be true is that the cluster runs Windows HPC Server, but the web site and supplementary materials available on this system aren’t specific on that point (also Dezineforce makes you give up your email address to download the product datasheet: boo!).

The hardware is in an enclosure designed to be used in an office and comes in 16-, 32-, or 64-core versions with with Intel Xeon X5570 processors and either 48, 96, or 192 GB of memory. There is also a rack-mount version that lets you grow up to 128 cores and 384 GB of memory.