Panasas Activestor enhances Ansys software

The combined solution, using Panasas Activestor Series 7, 8 and 9, enables the use of a parallel file system for input and output (I/O) of simulation data files.

This hardware/software combination is said to overcome performance bottlenecks related to conventional network attached storage and achieve higher levels of simulation throughput.

Customer field testing has demonstrated improvements in turnaround time of more than 200 per cent compared to the previous release running on a network file system (NFS).

The combination of Ansys 12.0 and Panasas storage is claimed to optimise a company's engineering resources and help it leverage simulation-driven product development.

'Our customers are achieving new levels of productivity using this technology, which allows them to deploy simulation on larger-scale computing platforms and to efficiently consider extremely high-fidelity simulations,' said Jim Cashman, president and chief executive at Ansys.

'Data intensity is a key concern for users of simulation, and the Panasas storage solution adds value across the full range of software products from Ansys,' he added.

Ansys customers require a computing and storage infrastructure that scales both processing and data transfer.

A study conducted by Panasas, Ansys and the University of Cambridge, which documented the benefits of the parallel storage solution, found an increased speed of up to 2.3 times for total job turnaround and increases in data write speed of 39 times.

More information on this study is available on the Ansys website.