LS-DYNA on Linux-Clusters at EDAG Use Case

John U.S. Hanlon, IT-Administrator, EDAG Engineering & Design AG Bernward Platz, Manager Software-Development, Teraport GmbH At EDAG, the increasing demand for crash simulations with LS-DYNA required the expansion of the existing compute resources in the beginning of 2002. As at this point there was a stable and performant MPP-version of LS-DYNA available, EDAG decided - despite of the new technology - to purchase a Linux-cluster consisting of 8 nodes and 16 processors. Meanwhile EDAG has deployed over 14 clusters at three different locations. Whereas at the beginning, purchase costs and performance played a major role, due to the increasing complexity further demands became important which were realised by the EDAG partner, Teraport: fast, convenient and reproducible installation and administration of the cluster systems parallel usage of several DYNA versions with various MPI-libraries easy extensibility convenient usage of cluster resources via web technologies high-available access to the cluster resources handling of high data transfer integration of further FEM-applications The paper describes a use case which reports the concepts of the realisation of these requirements as well as the problems such as hardware quality during the installation and setup of the cluster environment. At the end, a perspective concerning further possibilities of development such as web-based workflow optimization and result management will be shown.