Increasing the Scale of LS-DYNA Implicit Analysis

Cray, LSTC, NCSA, and Rolls-Royce formed a partnership to explore the future of implicit computations as the scale of both finite element models and the systems that run them increase. Rolls-Royce created a family of dummy engine models, using solid elements, with as many as 200,000,000 degrees of freedom. NCSA ran these with specialized LS-DYNA® variants, generated by Cray, on their Blue Waters machine, a hybrid Cray® XETM/XKTM system with 360,000 AMD cores. Processing and memory bottlenecks revealed themselves as the number of processors increased by an order of magnitude beyond that familiar to today’s developers and users, and LSTC made improvements to LS-DYNA. This paper will discuss the challenges encountered, enhancements made to LS-DYNA, and the results when extending the limits, both in terms of the scale of the model and the number of processors. This is ongoing work, and we will conclude by discussing the path forward that has been illuminated.