Industry News

September 10, 1999

ANSYS Certifies HP Visualize
X-Class Personal Workstations

CANONSBURG, PA, Sept. 9 -- ANSYS, Inc., has announced that Hewlett-Packard Company's Visualize X-Class Personal Workstation, powered by Intel's Pentium III Xeon processor, has passed the certification benchmarks for running ANSYS/Multiphysics^TM -- a coupled-field, multidisciplinary finite element analysis (FEA) program. According to ANSYS, the new dual-processor machines are twice as fast as Pentium II-based systems, with performance gains of up to 800 percent across a suite of 18 tests.

Certification means that a hardware vendor's workstations and graphics cards meet or exceed the technical requirements for running ANSYS, Inc.'s high-end simulation software. According to ANSYS, the series of tests -- which are administered through the ANSYS Partner Program -- have been carefully designed to mimic the ways in which ANSYS customers use their workstations.

"With Xeon processors running at 500 MHz or 550 MHz, the X-Class Personal Workstation ran the ANSYS benchmarks eight times quicker than the previous HP certified system, thus achieving a new standard in high-end computing," said Joe Manich, director of Development Services at ANSYS. "The performance gains this year are due to continuing efforts to optimize ANSYS on strategic partner platforms."

The HP Visualize graphics subsystems feature parallel-geometry accelerators based on PA-RISC technology. The X-Class workstations' performance is further enhanced with Intel's 440GX and 440BX AGP chipsets. ANSYS works closely with HP to fine-tune applications for high performance on this platform.