Full Throttle: Altair Accelerates Engineering Simulations With NVIDIA GPUs

Now with enhanced GPU support, Altair products powered by NVIDIA CUDA boost engineering simulations up to 4x faster than CPU.
by Baskar Rajagopalan

Whether analyzing fluid dynamics or speccing performance, engineers need to create high-quality simulations long before a single physical prototype takes shape.

To help engineers gain deeper insights into their designs, two products from engineering software company Altair — Altair AcuSolve and Thea Render — now offer enhanced support for NVIDIA GPUs, which produce incredible performance and speedups.

In addition to GPU support, Altair announced NVIDIA RTX Server validation of Altair ultraFluidX, an aerodynamics CFD software, as well as Altair nanoFluidX, a particle-based CFD software. A powerful reference design, RTX Server allows engineers to use high performance computing for simulating physics and iterating designs — all with GPU-accelerated rendering and computer-aided engineering simulation computing times.

AcuSolve Enhances CAE Workflows

AcuSolve is a general-purpose CFD software that helps engineers simulate the fluid flow with turbulence and heat transfer of a design. With NVIDIA GPUs, AcuSolve users can perform simulations up to 4x faster than on CPU only configuration.

With RTX Server powering Altair users can design new models faster and more efficiently
Blog images courtesy of Altair.

Thea Render Brings Design to Life

Thea Render, a powerful 3D rendering and animation tool, enables engineers to visualize realistic previews of their work. The CUDA-based renderer can now deliver ray tracing with NVIDIA OptiX AI-accelerated denoiser.

In addition, Altair Inspire Studio design software with Thea Render and visualization app ParaView both leverage GPU-accelerated AI to reduce the time it takes to render high-quality, noiseless images.

Altair applications use CUDA, the parallel computing and programming platform featured on NVIDIA GPUs, to gain significant increases in speed and throughput. This lets engineers freely and quickly explore designs and make decisions based on more accurate results.

RTX Server Accelerates Computations Overnight

Running design validation workloads on RTX Server similarly enhances GPU-based CFD solvers, which are software “engines” that use advanced computational algorithms to predict physical performance.

With RTX Server powering Altair ultraFluidX and nanoFluidX, users can design new models faster and more efficiently during the day on NVIDIA Quadro virtual workstations. The same RTX Server can then be used to complete large-scale CFD simulations overnight instead of taking days to compute the data.

When engineers arrive the next morning, the simulations are ready for them to analyze. This allows teams to understand the performance, behavior and mechanics of their models earlier in the design process — all while using a more energy-efficient computing system that’s accessible on premises or in the cloud.

Learn more about Altair and NVIDIA RTX Server for engineering.