Testing on multi-core machines showed improved performance speeds of up to five times over previous versions for faster analysis of large steady and unsteady datasets.

Tecplot, Inc. has released a major update for Tecplot 360 2011, the company’s software for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) visualization and analysis, with significant improvements in speed and performance.

“The end goal is to help our users get to their solutions more quickly, so they can get on with their work,” said Mike Peery, CEO and president of Tecplot, Inc. “Test cases, using typical desktop configurations on multi-core machines, are showing improvements in speed of up to five times over the previous version, Tecplot 360 2010. While these results are going to vary from one configuration to another, users should see marked improvement in speed.”

Specific test results on representative eight-core machines with 24GB RAM showed that the Release 2 (R2) version of Tecplot 360 2011:

• Four times faster than Tecplot 360 2009 and two times faster than the 2010 version when animating many translucent zones , using a dataset of 12 million cells with 500 zones
• At least an order of magnitude faster than the 2010 version in rendering fonts
• Five times faster than the 2010 version on time to first image, and 3.5 times faster on animating a cut plane, using data with two calculated variables, vorticity magnitude and pressure
• Able to easily animate through more than three terabytes of transient data on a desktop

In addition to more speed, theR2 version of Tecplot 360 2011 includes a new OpenFOAM loader, plus updated CGNS, Plot3D, and ANSYS loaders.

Platforms and pricing
Tecplot 360 2011 is available for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista, and XP; 32- and 64-bit Mac OS X and major UNIX platforms; and 64-bit Linux platforms. Pricing starts at $4,000 in the U.S. for a single-user perpetual license. Tecplot 360 users with current SMS agreements can upgrade to the latest version at no cost.

About Tecplot, Inc.
Founded in 1981 and based in Bellevue, Wash., Tecplot, Inc. empowers engineers and scientists to discover, analyze, and understand information in complex data, and to effectively communicate the results to others. The company launched Tecplot, its first software product for the scientific visualization market, in 1988. Since then, Tecplot has been applying and influencing the latest advances in visualization technologies and plotting capabilities. With thousands of users worldwide, Tecplot, Inc. has become a trusted name in data visualization.