From: clc5q@hemlock.cs.Virginia.EDU (Clark L. Coleman)
Subject: ANSYS Finite Element Analysis Benchmarks for Workstations
Organization: University of Virginia Computer Science Department
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 15:26:25 GMT

The numbers below are taken from the January, 1992, printing of the
"HP Apollo 9000 Series 700 Performance Report".  Numbers for machines
other than HP are only available for the SP3, LS1 and LS4 benchmarks.
Some of these numbers must be read from a bar graph, and are thus
prefixed with the symbol " ~ " meaning "approximately".
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ANSYS is a proprietary finite element analysis (FEA) system developed
and marketed by Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI).  SASI has provided
a set of benchmark data to ahrdware vendors.  These benchmarks are
representative of the mechanical design environment.  The table below lists
the results of all the ANSYS LS and SP tests for the HP Series 700 systems,
along with non-HP results for the SP3, LS1 and LS4 tests.  The reported
metrics are CPU time (user plus system) and elapsed time, in seconds.
Thus, smaller numbers are better.  For the HP systems, numbers reported
are for disk drives with 32KB blocks and 4KB fragments, and also 8KB blocks
and 1KB fragments (shown as "HP7xx (32/4)" and "HP7xx (8/1)", respectively.)
Notice that the block size of the disk drive significantly affects the
elapsed time, with a minor effect on CPU time (the extra waiting on disk
accesses is typically not counted as CPU time, although some CPU overhead
is involved in swapping and thus there is a minor effect.  The difference
between elapsed and CPU time grows significantly for the smaller block sizes.)
Block sizes are not reported for the non-HP systems.

SASI has validated all of the numbers below. Measurements were typically made
by the hardware vendors and checked by SASI before publication by SASI.
As of December, 1991, the only results for the LS tests were from HP, IBM,
and the Sun 4/490 server.

The SP3 benchmark is a moderately sized 3D static stress analysis of a pressure
vessel with an RMS wave front of 150.  The static analysis large scale (LS)
tests represent a cantilevered plate with one stress element through the
thickness of the plate.  The mesh size is varied for different cases.  LS1
has an RMS wavefront of 573.3 while LS4 has an RMS wavefront of 2249.0.
The various SP tests are also different mesh sizes for the pressure vessel
stress analysis.

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The results below are sorted by increasing CPU time for the SP3 benchmark,
which is the column with the most data available.

                SP1           SP2          SP3          SP4          SP5
SYSTEM     CPU  elapsed    CPU elapsed   CPU elapsed  CPU  elapsed  CPU elapsed
------     ------------    -----------   -----------  ------------  -----------
Cray 2                                   29   ---
HP750(32/4)  8    9         22   22      42   43       12   14       42   43
HP750(8/1)   8   10         22   23      43   52       13   14       44   51
HP730(32/4)  8    9         22   23      43   49       13   17       44   49
HP730(8/1)   8   10         23   23      45   62       13   14       45   62
IBM RS6000/550                           50   ---
HP720(32/4) 10   12         29   30      56   66       17   19       56   66
HP720(8/1)  10   13         29   30      57   90       17   19       58   89
HP710(32/4) 13   15         40   41      69   77       22   24       70   77
HP710(8/1)  13   15         40   41      72  102       23   25       72  103
IBM RS6000/530                          ~83   85
IBM RS6000/320H                          85   ---
SGI IRIS 4D/3xx                         114   ---
SGI INDIGO                              130   ---
DEC 5000/200                           ~145  228
Sun 4/490                               187   ---
DEC 5000/120                           ~210  290
Sun SS2                                ~225  308

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The results below are sorted by increasing CPU time for the LS1 benchmark.
Note that the IBM systems would move up in the list if it were sorted by
the LS4 times, which are for a larger problem size.

                 LS1           LS2          LS3          LS4          LS5
SYSTEM      CPU elapsed    CPU elapsed   CPU elapsed   CPU elapsed  CPU elapsed
------      ------------   -----------   -----------   -----------  -----------
Cray 2      ~60   72                                   699   ---
IBM 550     107  ---                                 ~3000  3487
HP750(32/4) 110  121        551  622    1647 1815     3786  4095     3654 4028
HP750(8/1)  113  140        564  696    1668 1979     3826  4364     3702 4369
HP730(32/4) 113  132        550  628    1634 1810     3725  4037     3622 3995
HP730(8/1)  116  152        561  702    1657 1971     3761  4305     3668 4342
HP720(32/4) 148  175        719  828    2132 2372     4833  5266     4721 5230
HP720(8/1)  151  216        732  989    2160 2703     4884  5843     4776 5927
IBM 530    ~175  184                                 ~5000  6051
HP710(32/4) 177  206        957 1085    3204 3486     7784  8287     7154 7752
HP710(8/1)  182  243        979 1230    3248 3768     7860  8787     7247 8342
IBM 320H    187  ---                                 ~5400  6243
Sun 4/490  1173  ---                                 63022   ---

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No configuration details were given for any of the systems in the HP Apollo
source document.



-- 
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"It is seldom that any liberty is lost all at once." David Hume
|||  clc5q@virginia.edu (Clark L. Coleman)