Casting simulation performance improvement 30x

Teksid Aluminium, one of the major aluminium casting groups worldwide, decided to improve its casting process simulation capabilities with a Magmasoft cluster license

Teksid Aluminium, one of the major aluminium casting groups worldwide, decided to improve its own casting process simulation capabilities with a Magmasoft cluster license.

In April, a Linux cluster with 16 processors supplied by Linux NetworX and the corresponding Magmasoft cluster license were installed in Carmagnola, near Turin.

The Technical Direction "Innovation and R and D" on site and various manufacturing plants of Teksid Aluminium all over the world are using Magmasoft for now almost ten years.

A substantial decrease in response times.

"Having used Magmasoft successfully on Windows PCs so far, we expect a substantial decrease in response time by using the Magmasoft cluster version", states Dr Marcello Badiali, Vice President Engineering of Teksid Aluminium.

"We use Magmasoft not only to satisfy requests from our foundries.

We also apply our simulation ability to support our customers during early stages of their component design, as we need to cope with the growing demand for simulation runs.

The benchmarks we performed with the Magmasoft cluster version, combined to the well-known Linux NetworX hardware reliability, convinced us to add a new client-server architecture to the existing PC environment.

This server is built around the Magmasoft cluster version.

The architecture will allow our users to continue operating in the usual environment.

At the same time, they are able to take advantage of the licenses sharing among our European works.

The software also fully covers the internal communication and the data logistics".

Performance increase up to 30 times.

Teksid Aluminium installed an eight-node cluster Linux Networx, with a two Pentium IV 2.8 GHz processors and one GByte main memory per node.

"Compared to the single processor workstations we used, a speed increase up to 30 times is to be expected, dependent on the project and physics to be modeled" declares Mr Paolo Bovero, Process Simulation Manager of Teksid Aluminium.

"Moreover, the actual hardware configuration will allow us to extend our capacities just plugging in further nodes".

Cluster technology: state-of-the-art solution for mid-sized companies.

"Having already three installations in Italy and more than ten all over the world, Teksid Aluminium shows with its decision, that the cluster technology is becoming an industrial state-of-the-art solution also in the foundry world.

As the software environment remains the same for the user, the Magmasoft cluster version is increasingly being accepted as a strongly performing option for medium-sized enterprises", declares Piero Parona, Sales Manager of EnginSoft and Magmasoft distributor in Italy.

The decision of Teksid Aluminium is the most recent installation of the Magmasoft cluster in central Europe: after the DaimlerChrysler central tooling shop in Stuttgart, Honsel in Meschede, Audi in Ingolstadt, von Roll in Switzerland, De Globe in Netherland, PSA in France and Zanardi in Italy.

Further cluster licenses have been installed at Nemak, Mexico, Honda Group, Japan as well as Ford, Superior, and CAPT in the USA.

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