SEMCAD X
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Performance

Benchmark1: CAD model of car, driver, cell phone with overlaid electric fields of the simulation


Benchmark1: Electric field in phone and hand (detail)


Benchmark2: Human male head, deep brain stimulation implant and box


Benchmark3: Full CAD PCB board

PERFORMANCE

SEMCAD X is setting new standards in CEM by offering some of the fastest FDTD solvers and enhancements on the market. Offering awesome speedup, excellent RAM memory efficiency and useful features like auto-termination, solving large problems has never been so easy.

Furthermore, SEMCAD X was the first FDTD toolkit in the market offering hardware acceleration. Simulation speeds of 700-3000 MCells/s puts SEMCAD X in a league of its own as far as solver performance is concerned.

Please do contact us to request performance information related to your specific applications. The following 3 examples are used as performance benchmarks to highlight the advanced performance of SEMCAD X:

SEMCAD X Simulation Bench 1 Bench 2 Bench 3
Model car, driver, phone head with implant PCB
frequency (MHz) 1800 64 500-2000
No. time step 5896 406435 404530
computational domain (million cells)
296.6 355.8  286.2
excitation
antenna resonator coax line
ABC UPML 8 lyrs UPML 11 lyrs UPML 9 lyrs
Solver Performance Bench 1 Bench 2 Bench 3
GPU Solver Speed (Mcell/s)* 2994 2685 2524
GPU Solver Time (hh:mm) 1:04 28:54 71:15
CPU Solver Speed (Mcell/s)** 27 19.8 15.6
CPU Solver Time (hh:mm)  52:21 2043:00 280:00
* System with four quad-core Intel Xeon CPU E5620 processors, 74 GB of RAM and four NVIDIA Tesla C2070
** HPxw9400 workstations with Dual Core AMD Opteron 2216 at 2.4 GHz and 16 GB of RAM


The following table shows the performance of SEMCAD X and Acceleware's FDTD solver using NVIDIA Series 20 (Fermi) hardware.

NVIDIA GPU Number of GPU’s Maximum Speed Achieved in Mcells/s Optimum Simulation Size in Mcells
Tesla C2070 1 780 up to 150
2x Tesla C2070 2 1650 up to 280
Tesla S2070 4 2800 up to 560
2 ... n Tesla
n * 4 > 3000 > 1000

NVIDIA's Fermi architecture adds improved double precision throughput, ECC support, and improved overall performance. In addition, two or more of these cards can be connected in parallel to allow higher performance and larger domain sizes. The Series 20 shows remarkable improvement over the previous Series 10 (Tesla), but it positively eclipses the solver speed of CPU-only solver. Solving large-scale, high-resolution problems in CPU-based software becomes too burdensome to be practical, as shown in the plot below.

Comparison of Simulation Size vs. Solver Speed in Fermi hardware

SEMCAD X's numerical solver allows multiple computers as a Beowulf-style cluster to cooperatively run a single FDTD simulation using the Acceleware Cluster library. A single simulation space is partitioned across multiple computer nodes using MPI processes and time stepped synchronously. This cluster CPU solution is now available Linux 64 bit architectures.  

The following benchmark was run in the Ben Arabi cluster at FPC Murcia, Spain. The Arabi cluster consists of 102 nodes, for a total of 816 cores of Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5450@3GHz and 1072 GB of distributed memory. The benchmark used was the generic phone model gridded at 195 Mcells. This example shows how solver speed sclaes with the number of cores executing the simulation.

Performance of the MPI-CPU Solver with Ben-Arabí Cluster FPCMur.

 

 
 
 
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SPEAG @ EUCAP 2012
26/03/2012 - 30/03/2012 (Prague, Czech Republic)
 
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05/05/2012 - 11/05/2012 (Melbourne, Australia)
 
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08/05/2012 - 10/05/2012 (New Orleans, USA)
 
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