Silicon Graphics has announced the addition of two government off-the-shelf (GOTS) application software suites, CTH and Xpatch, to the portfolio of computer-aided engineering software available on the SGI Altix and Silicon Graphics Prism family of servers, clusters and visualization systems. CTH, shock wave physics software that simulates high speed impact and penetration, and Xpatch, an electromagnetics radar simulation software suite for predicting and analyzing high frequency signatures, are now optimized for SGI systems.

Significant numbers of U.S. Department of Defense research organizations, agencies and prime contractors rely on CAE applications to improve design quality, mission and target precision and to reduce design-cycle time and costs in the development of warfighter systems for sea, land, air, and space-based defense applications. By combining the HPC technologies of the Intel Itanium 2 processors, the open-source 64-bit Linux operating system and SGI NUMAflex scalable system architecture, the SGI Altix and Silicon Graphics Prism family of systems can offer the capability to meet the needs of CAE simulation environments for DoD weapons development.

Developed by Sandia National Laboratories, CTH is shock wave physics software that simulates high-speed impact and penetration phenomena involving a variety of materials. Uses of CTH software include studying weapon effects, armor/anti-armor interactions, warhead design, high-explosive initiation physics and weapon safety considerations. Primary users include DOE national laboratories, the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and other DoD-sponsored research and development organizations. CTH is also used in national missile defense, hazardous material dispersal by explosive detonation, weapon components design and reactive materials research.

This release of CTH v7.0 includes performance enhancements from code optimizations invoked with the Intel compiler, and the use of SGI Message Passing Toolkit (MPT) which provides standard message-passing libraries optimized for SGI systems running Linux. These high-performance libraries permit application developers to use standard, portable interfaces for developing parallel applications software while obtaining the best possible communications performance.

Xpatch, developed by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) is a premier electromagnetic software suite for predicting and analyzing high-frequency radar signatures. Xpatch is a set of prediction and analysis tools that use the shooting-and-bouncing ray (SBR) method to predict realistic far-field and near-field radar signatures for 3D target models. SAIC also develops and distributes SAF, a method of moments full-wave solver for low frequency electromagnetics predictions, which is also available for SGI Altix.

The Xpatch toolset is used by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for multiple radar simulation programs. There are over 500 organizations across the U.S. in both industrial and government applications using Xpatch to produce and analyze scattering data for realistic aircraft, missiles, ships, spacecraft and ground vehicles.

According to Luke Lin, deputy division manager, SAIC, "The technology and applications engineering investments from SGI and Intel provide SAIC with a solid foundation for Xpatch software development and radar cross-section simulation, design and analysis. The computing capabilities of the SGI Altix and the Silicon Graphics Prism's ability to tightly integrate HPC with advanced visualization can provide efficient and cost-effective simulation environments for SAIC's computational electromagnetics applications."

The current DoD challenges in CAE workflow requirements continue to benefit from the SGI technology of HPC servers and clusters for computation, visualization systems for pre- and post-processing, and file management solutions for CAE simulation data.

The availability of CTH and Xpatch are part of SGI's and Intel's efforts to offer DoD-critical CAE software from the GOTS community, and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) CAE software from a variety of independent software vendors. Samples of available GOTS and COTS software for CAE simulation include:

    -- Computational Structural Mechanics (CSM): ABAQUS from ABAQUS
       Inc., ANSYS from ANSYS, Inc., LS-DYNA from Livermore Software
       Technology Corp., MSC.Nastran and MSC.Marc from MSC.Software
       Corporation, and NX Nastran from UGS Corp.
      
    -- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD): ANSYS CFX from ANSYS Inc.,
       CFD++ from Metacomp Technologies Inc., CFD-FASTRAN from ESI Group,
       Cobalt from Cobalt Solutions LLC, GASP from Aerosoft Inc., FEFLO from
       SAIC and George Mason University, FLUENT from Fluent Inc., OVERFLOW
       and USM3D from NASA Langley Research Center, and STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+
       from CD-adapco.
      
    -- Computational Electromagnetics (CEM): FEKO from EMSS Ltd., FMS from
       Multipath Corp., SAF and SIGLBC from SAIC, XFDTD from Remcom
       Inc., and ELEKTRA from Vector Fields Ltd.
      
    -- CAE Pre- and Post-Processing, and Visualization: Gridgen from
       Pointwise Inc., ANSYS ICEM CFD from ANSYS Inc., EnSight from
       Computational Engineering Intl., FIELDVIEW from Intelligent Light Inc.,
       Tecplot from Tecplot Inc., and a variety of pre- and
       post-processors from ISV integrated CAE packages.
      
    -- CAE Simulation Data Management: MSC.SimManager from MSC.Software

"SGI is helping to advance a growing class of DoD scientists, researchers and engineers who are moving from proprietary architectures to industry standard technologies that drive value and efficiencies into their CAE workflow," said Anthony Robbins, president, SGI Federal. "We are satisfied in our joint-collaboration with Intel as we focus on our growing list of application software developers that further enhance DoD's capabilities in CAE simulation for the warfighter."