Sun Business Ready HPC for MD Nastran 
by Dale Layfield
June 2009
This Sun BluePrints™ article provides necessary performance tuning recommendations and guidelines to allow an IT administrator or experienced MD Nastran user to configure both MD Nastran and the hardware platform for optimum performance (reduced elapsed times). This article offers best practice guidelines for customizing the platform's memory and disk configuration and optimizing use of the available processing cores on each compute node. A recommended hardware configuration is also included. In addition, this document can help provide an understanding of how to (1) estimate the optimum amount of memory (RAM) needed to run a particular MD Nastran analysis, (2) determine the number of concurrent MD Nastran jobs that can efficiently run on one compute node, and (3) take advantage of MD Nastran's File Management System (FMS) interface to access the available storage devices for maximum I/O performance.
Contents
- Introduction
- Challenges and Tuning Considerations
- Background on MD Nastran performance
- Optimizing MD Nastran performance
- Recommended Configuration
- For More Information
- Solution Implementation
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- Related Resources
- Ordering Sun Documents
- Accessing Sun Documentation Online
- Configuring RAIDfor the Solaris OS and Linux operating environments
- Creating a Solaris ZFS file system RAID volume on the Solaris 10 OS
- Creating a RAID file system on the Linux operating environment
- Performance Studies
- Study #1: Local versus network attached storage
- Study #2: SSDs versus SAS drives
- Study #3: Effects of different memory configurations
- Study #4: Running concurrent jobs on one node
- How to calculate the best MDNastran memory settings
- Guidelines for choosing the best file allocation settings
- The Lustre file system
- Lustre file system design
Dale Layfield is currently a staff engineer in Sun's ISV Engineering organization. He has over 30 years of experience as a technical software specialist working in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, including 26 years focused on Nastran development. Based on this experience, Dale has extensive knowledge of all aspects of software development, from software design, coding, and QA, to porting and tuning software on the latest computing hardware. In his role as Sun's "Technology Market Segment Engineering Leader" for the Manufacturing industry he has gained extensive insight into this industry's HPC related issues.
The author would like to recognize the following individuals for their contributions to this article:
- Mike Burke, Sun Strategic Applications Engineering, for content in Appendix B, • Study #1
- Larry McIntosh, Sun Systems Engineering Solutions Group, for content in • Appendix E, the Lustre File System
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