Initially, they used personal workstations to perform simulations using one or two cores. However, this PC-based approach was not sufficient for the larger problems the group was asked to solve.

In just a few months, the TotalCAE HPC appliance delivered improvements in both reliability and productivity. ARA is seeing 20% speed-up improvements in job compute times on the same number of cores.

The new system has also helped with visualization. Previously, ARA purchased two visualization nodes froma different vendor but could never get them working correctly. With five high-end video cards in each node, it was an expensive lesson. Now, ARA has a high-end visualization node from TotalCAE that just works, and has helped improve post-processing.