Maximizing Cluster Utilization for LS-DYNA ® Using 100 Gb / s InfiniBand

From concept to engineering and from design to test and manufacturing, the automotive industry relies on powerful virtual development solutions. Crash simulations are performed in an effort to secure quality, safety and accelerate the development process. As the models become more complex to better simulate the physical behavior in crash simulations, the computers that run as a cluster also need to be higher to meet the needs of the higher standards for simulating these more elaborate models. Among the various components in a compute cluster, the high performance network interconnect is an integral factor which is key in making the simulation run efficiently. The Mellanox Connect-IBTM InfiniBand adapter has introduced a novel high-performance and scalable architecture for highperformance clusters. The architecture was designed from the ground up to provide high performance and maximize scalability for the largest supercomputers in the world today and in the future. This paper demonstrates the new features and technologies driven by the Connect-IB InfiniBand adapters. Besides its raw abilities of delivering submicrosecond latency and a full bandwidth of over 100Gbps using two of the FDR links, its hardware capabilities also includes CPU offloads, MPI collective operations acceleration and message transport services that make LS-DYNA to perform at scale. This paper also demonstrates running multiple parallel simulations to achieve higher cluster productivity, in an effort to exploit with this new level of performance available from the network.