Platforms and Hardware Recommendations
Platform Support
Platforms, operating systems, and processors supported by Altair HyperWorks 2023.1 products, which includes 2023.1 solver packages.
| Platforms | Altair HyperWorks 2023.1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OS | Version | Architecture | GUI Products | Solvers |
| Windows | 10 | x86_64 | YES | YES |
| Windows | 11 | x86_64 | YES | YES |
| Linux | RHEL / Oracle Linux 8.4 SLES 15 SP3 |
x86_64 | YES | YES |
| Linux | Rocky Linux 8.4 | x86_64 | NO | YES |
- Windows Ultra High Definition (UHD/HiDPI) support requires Windows 10 Update 1709 or higher
- RHEL= Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- SLES = SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
- Linux
- Altair HyperWorks products may install and run on other non-supported Linux distributions not mentioned or referred to in this documentation, but Altair does not test, certify, verify or warrant the reliability of the products on these platforms.
- Ultra High Definition (UHD)
-
- UHD resolution support (2160p) is only available for Windows 10
(1709 or higher).
- Using Windows 200% scaling for 2160p is recommended.
- Our recommended HD setting is 1080p for FHD and our Ultra HD setting is 2160p.
- Java based tools within our products may still show some scaling issues under Ultra HD resolution.
- UHD resolution support (2160p) is only available for Windows 10
(1709 or higher).
Refer to the Hardware Recommendations section for details.
Hardware Recommendations
Altair does not recommend any particular brand of hardware. All
hardware purchases are going to balance the cost versus performance. The following
are some items which can affect the performance with OptiStruct.
- CPU
- The faster the clock speed of the processor, along with the speed at which data is exchanged between CPU cores of processor, the better the performance.
- Memory
- The amount of memory required by an analysis depends on the solution type, types of elements in the model, and model size. Large OptiStruct solutions can require large amounts of memory. Also, memory that is not used by OptiStruct is still available for I/O caching. So the amount of free memory can dramatically effect the wall clock time of the run. The more free memory, the less I/O wait time and the faster the job will run. Even if an analysis is too large to run in-core, having extra memory available will increase the speed of the analysis because unused RAM will be used by the operating system to buffer disk requests.
- Disk drives
- OptiStruct solutions often require the writing of large temporary scratch files to the hard drive. Therefore, it is important to have fast hard drives. The best solution is to use two or more fast hard drives in RAID 0 (striped) as a dedicated place for scratch files during the solution. A typical configuration is to have one drive for the operating system and software, and then 2-15 drives striped together as the scratch space for the runs.
- Interconnect
- The parallel SPMD versions of OptiStruct can run on multiple processors and/or on multiple nodes in the cluster. To run parallel jobs on a cluster, each should have enough RAM to run a full job in non-parallel mode. And, each node in a cluster should have its own disk space that is sufficient to store all the scratch files on that node. Cluster architecture with separate disks for each node will achieve better performance than single shared RAID array of disks. A fast interconnect is important, but anything over Gigabit Ethernet will not speed the solution visibly. When nodes use a shared scratch disk area, the interconnect speed is a critical factor for all out-of-core jobs.
For a large NVH analysis, it is recommended to have at least 8 GB per CPU with at least 4 disks in RAID 0 for temporary scratch files.