HP server and cluster solutions for CAE

Exceed your expectations

Choose your optimal CAE solution, based on the interconnect options. With so many choices, how do

industry’s broadest choice of industry-standard

products and HP expertise. Exceed your CAE
compute, data, and visualization requirements and
achieve greater return on your investments.
Choose your optimal CAE solution, based on the
industry’s broadest choice of industry-standard
products and HP expertise. Exceed your CAE
compute, data, and visualization requirements and
achieve greater return on your investments.
you select the optimal CAE solution to meet your
needs now and in the future?
HP helps you not only achieve success, but exceed
your business and IT expectations. As a trusted
business partner, HP will guide you through the
confusion. HP understands that every customer is
unique and demands specific requirements. We
offer a full range of high performance computing
(HPC) options for CAE—and the expertise to help
you select the right solution.

Manufacturing companies worldwide are gaining a Business challenge: selecting a

competitive advantage through advances in successful CAE solution
computer-aided engineering (CAE) technology. The
HP’s solution architects will evaluate your CAE
latest technology allows engineers to more
requirements, working with you to navigate the
accurately reflect real world prototyping by
complex range of options available today. We
increasing modeling fidelity and simulation
know that the performance of your CAE applications
scenarios. More accurate analysis helps reduce
drives your hardware procurement decision;
design cycles, increase product quality, and lower
therefore, we work with you to determine the most
costs.
effective systems for your commercial or in-house
However, along with the benefits of increased CAE codes.
analysis, organizations are also encountering
We consider how every aspect of your system
increased business and IT complexity. Today’s
affects performance: applications, the number of
technology offerings include a confusing collection
CPUs, nodes, clock speed, OS, and cluster
of hardware, software, operating systems, and

Power, expandability, and
affordability with world-class
designs
"We were able to complete
more tasks in a far shorter
time, significantly improving
our profitability, our products
and ultimately securing our
competitive edge in the
market. The only downside is
that the cluster is so fast, we
don't even have time for a
coffee break!"
Steffen Forster, an information
technology director for
Continental AG, leading maker
of automobile tires and parts
2
HP Workstations HP ProLiant
Servers
ervers
The world’s best-selling servers
and clusters that meet a broad
range of HPC application
requirements
interconnects. To determine your performance goals,
we discuss the percentage of improvement in turn-
around time and/or job throughput you require. We
also rank your preferred attributes such as raw
performance, total performance, relative
price/performance, net price, system reliability, ease
of administration, and ISV usage. Only after a
thorough evaluation, can we determine the best
solution to solve your unique CAE challenges.
Expertly optimized CAE codes from partner ISVs
HP’s long-standing partnerships with independent
software vendors (ISVs) combined with our broad
range of platforms provide you access to the
industry’s largest portfolio of application software
available today. For over fifteen years, HP’s team of
CAE technical consultants has worked with ISVs
porting and optimizing CAE applications to excel on
all HP systems.
HP currently maintains close technical and business
relationships with more than forty ISVs, which
assures excellent performance and support of our
customers’ CAE applications on all HP servers,
clusters and workstations. An engineer in HP’s ISV
engineering group works directly with the ISV’s
engineers to ensure applications work correctly and
achieve maximum performance and scalability on
HP servers.
ISV partners include all of the leading developers of
today’s most prevalent CAE codes including
structures, computational fluid dynamics (CFD),
pre/post processing, optimization, molding, and
electromagnetics. (For a complete list of CAE
partners visit www.hp.com/go/CAE).
HP BladeSystem
Innovative datacenter blade
portfolio that supports all
three industry-standard
processor architectures
Optimal CAE performance—
broadest range of industry-standard systems
Only HP offers a full range of industry-standard
processors, operating environments, middleware,
interconnects, and integration services. HP can tailor
a solution to fit your requirements by providing
numerous options:
• All three 64-bit industry-standard microprocessor
architectures: Intel Itanium® 2 and Xeon™; AMD®
Opteron™
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers or
distributed-memory (DMP) clusters, leveraging HP's
high performance Message Passing Interface
library (HP-MPI)
• UNIX® (HP-UX11i), Linux®, or Microsoft®
Windows® 64-bit operating environments
• SAN, NAS or HP StorageWorks Scalable File
Share (HP SFS) to manage exploding volume of
simulation data
Reliable systems assembled and deployed
with HP expertise
With an extensive history of innovation, HP enjoys a
well-known and well-respected leadership position in
the HPC community. This expertise means that you
will receive the greatest possible return on your CAE
investments.
• According to a 2007 IDC report1 , HP leads the
HPC market for the fourth consecutive year with 33
percent market share.
• The same report noted that HP took the top
position in worldwide blade server factory revenue
1IDC, Worldwide Technical Server QView Q4 2006,
February 2007
 and units shipped, according to fourth calendar
quarter 2006 server market figures.
• In 2007, Supercomputingonline.com announced
the winner of their 2006 Online Readers’ Choice
Award. The HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades
easily won the first place award, receiving more
than 25 percent of the total votes among twelve
nominated products.
Reliability through knowledgeable
service and support
HP offers comprehensive service and support
options, including managed services, consulting and
integration, and guaranteed response time services.
For CAE customers we offer system installation and
tuning, application loading and version control, set-
up of job management queuing, output file storage,
and archiving.
IT Challenge:
conquering performance demands
HP offers the broadest choice of industry-standard
clusters, servers, and workstations to meet all of your
CAE performance demands. HP’s integrated and
open systems allow you to mitigate technology risks
and compete more effectively in the demanding,
global market.
“We operate in a very straightforward and
streamlined engineering environment, focused on
cost and quality. CAE methods combining
PAM-CRASH 2G software on HP Integrity servers
with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors help us improve
vehicle designs and occupant protection. This
speeds up crash test processes, reducing the number
of physical prototypes.”
--Mr. Agustín, Head of Simulation Department, SEAT
Easy to deploy and manage CAE clusters
HP has developed a common cluster platform
framework supporting all of our clustering options,
so you can choose the hardware and software that
best suits your computing environment. Our building-
block design offers configuration tools for easy
ordering, predefined systems for rapid deployment,
and reference platforms for ISV certification testing.
We leverage industry-standard hardware and
software components for more affordable and open
cluster solutions.
Providing customers with a choice of tested options
is significant to the appeal HP’s cluster portfolio. The
modular design supports a full spectrum of customer
requirements and enables easy expansion.
Configuration choices include node counts,
processors, interconnects, operating systems, open
source and commercial middleware, and application
software. You have access to technologies and
products with the assurance that they have been
thoroughly tested and integrated with every
component in the portfolio. This array of choices
enables you to select the best technology for your
workload, budget, and experience.
“We found the HP Cluster Platform very useful
because it provided defined cluster configurations
with the flexibility to choose types of server, number
of servers, and interconnect. In addition, the
flexibility to preload Windows CCS at HP provided
significant advantages in deployment.”
Dr. J.S. Hurley, Senior Manager, Distributed Software
and Systems Integration, Boeing.
Cluster management tools in the HP framework are
either HP-developed or partner-based. The XC
software stack offers a turnkey Red Hat compatible
system for Linux installations. HP also offers SUSE
Linux with a set of third party cluster tools that HP
has tested with the most popular CAE applications.
For small to mid-sized organizations, HP offers
Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server
2003 (CCS)—an integrated, standards-based
compute clustering platform.
Complementing the HP operating environments is
HP’s high performance Message Passing Interface
library (HP-MPI). HP-MPI is distributed by over 25
CAE ISVs for their Linux cluster platform support,
making it the de facto standard for cluster computing
in CAE.
Cut your computing challenges
down to size with blades
Blade systems help solve the challenges typically
associated with cluster computing—cabling
complexity, increased power/cooling requirements,
configuration changes, and total cost of ownership.
HP is leading the way in blade server adoption with
solutions that provide higher performance and
greater flexibility at lower costs. The HP BladeSystem
series, the fastest blade solution available for HPC,
delivers innovative virtualization, power and
cooling, and system management capabilities.
HP also offers the HP Cluster Platform Workgroup
System (CP Workgroup System) a complete,
integrated supercomputer-in-a-box. The CP
3
 Workgroup System delivers nearly a teraflop/s of
computing power without the complexity and
expense of an enterprise-level cluster system.
Designed for small to midsize organizations or
workgroups, the system is affordable, simple to
deploy and easy to manage. Best of all, the CP
Workgroup System requires no special power,
cooling or staff. It puts the power of supercomputing
in your hands, improving productivity, speeding
design, and reducing the cost of innovation.
Achieve high performance with lower costs
HP servers deliver powerful throughput, flexible
operation, and easy system management. Servers
range from rack-mount 1U pizza box enclosures on
the low end, to a mid-range array of blades, to the
high-end 128-core HP Integrity Superdome system.
All servers leverage standards-based economics to
maximize price/performance, application
availability, and configuration flexibility. For
example, HP Integrity servers running HP-UX11i
have supported virtually all CAE solver codes since
2003, tuned to achieve the highest possible
performance.
HP ProLiant servers offer full-speed 32-bit and 64-bit
CAE application performance for Linux and
Microsoft Windows environments. Many CAE
applications execute natively on the industry-
standard 64-bit architectures offered by Intel and
AMD, enabling customers to take advantage of the
larger problem-solving capability of these systems.
HP leadership in CAD/CAE workstations
performance and quality is legendary. We combine
engineering innovation, solutions excellence, and a
strong commitment to industry relationships to
maximize engineers’ productivity. CAE users will
find that HP Personal Workstations provide the
ultimate in power at affordable prices. For example,
you can choose an xw8400 workstation
configuration with two dual- or quad-core
processors, resulting in four or eight processor cores
in a single desktop with up to 64GB of RAM.
Image on page 2 courtesy of SolidWorks. The images on page 3 courtesy of: aerospace vehicle from MSC.Software,
turbine from ABAQUS Inc., SR-71 Blackbird from Metacomp Technologies, and turbofan from ANSYS Inc.
© Copyright 2003–2007 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to
change without notice.
Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Opteron is a trademark of
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Intel, Itanium, and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation
or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Printed in the United States.
Please visit www.hp.com/go/CAE
5982-8333EN, November 2007
More options to increase performance
HP’s CAE product portfolio encompasses all three of
the major operating environments—Unix (HP-UX11i),
Linux, and Microsoft Windows. You can choose the
operating system that best meets your needs now,
and still have the flexibility to change operating
systems as your technical needs change.
HP’s scalable storage solutions include options that
improve scalability, performance,
price/performance, ease of use, and administration.
Data management is seamlessly integrated with
computation, thereby enhancing performance and
creating a complete HPC solution. HP StorageWorks
Scalable File Share (HP SFS) increases simulation
and data analysis performance by reliably scaling
parallel I/O bandwidth across dozens to thousands
of distributed compute nodes. Standards-based
architectures mean you can choose the perfect
balance of performance, capacity, and price.
The HP Scalable Visualization Array (SVA) works
within the context of the overall HP computer
clustering architecture and is a powerful tool for
running data intensive graphics applications. SVA
brings powerful parallel computing to many
demanding visualization challenges by leveraging
advances in processors, workstations, graphics, and
networking. This base of scalable hardware
underlies robust Linux clustering software from HP. It
is further enhanced by a set of utilities and support
software developed by HP and its partners to
facilitate the use of the system by new and existing
user applications.
A complete CAE Solution
Working with HP and our ISV partners, you can
discover the most effective HPC solutions available
to meet your CAE needs. By choosing from a wide
range of powerful, reliable, industry-standard
solutions, you can increase productivity and
efficiency, bringing improved products to market
faster.