• MSC Software's Press Release, 3 November 2011: MSC Nastran 2012 Delivers Significantly Expanded Simulation of Real World Behaviors
• NVIDIA Press Release: GPU-Accelerated Engineering Simulation Application to Enable Highest Quality Products for Aerospace and Other Mission Critical Fields

Recent performance studies conducted together with MSC engineers demonstrated that the Tesla C2050 GPU acceleration of Intel Xeon (Westmere and Nehalem) CPUs resulted in speed-ups in the range of 4-6X with a single GPU over a serial run and in the range of 1.4-1.8X with 2 GPUs over a 8 core DMP run.

The GPUs supported with this implementation are the NVIDIA Tesla 20-series and Quadro GPUs based on the Fermi architecture (compute capability 2.0). Linux and Windows 64-bit platforms are supported.

Sparse direct solver intensive SOL101 (linear statics), SOL400 (nonlinear) and SOL108 (direct frequency) analysis are potential candidates for GPU computing. SOL108 would need a complex sparse direct solver that is not supported in the present implementation (MSC Nastran 2012). Likewise, conventional SOL111 (modal frequency) also should benefit from GPU computing in a later release.

The powerful GPU computing capabilities in MSC Nastran 2012 were developed on NVIDIA Tesla and Quadro GPU computing products and require the use of recent CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPUs, such as the Tesla 20-series products and supporting CUDA v4.0 (learn more).

Tesla and Quadro GPU computing products are designed to deliver the highest computational performance with the most reliable numerical accuracy, and are available and supported by the world's leading professional system manufacturers.