Paris, France and Santa Clara, USA, April 24, 2007 – ESI Group (ESIN FR0004110310), the leading solution provider in physics based simulation software and Intel, the world’s largest chip maker announce the results of their fruitful technological collaboration. R&D teams at ESI Group and Intel’s engineers have been working to optimize the Visual Environment v3.0 to take full advantage of Intel’s multi-core processors by using Intel’s software tools (Intel® VTune, Intel® Thread Checker…). This achievement represents a significant competitive advantage in terms of computing performance, cost efficiency, size of the crash model, and more accurate simulations in order to totally answer customers’ needs and future performance requirements.

ESI Group’s integrated solution is a proven engineering simulation environment based on openness and extended interoperability with tier CAE and ESI Group’s solvers. Today the industry needs to move away from the traditional trial-and-error methodology to embrace Simulation Based Design. It will help companies to innovate faster by reducing the need for real prototypes through collaborative engineering.

This sharing of resources between the two companies has produced a significant step forward in realistic simulations using a minimum of 10 million elements for crash simulation. The first results give the following advantages and benefits: up to 250% performance boost in data processing from VE 2.5 to the VE 3.0 optimized on the latest dual-core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5100 Series and more than 4 GB allocated in memory using Windows XP 64bit on latest multi-core Intel Xeon processor. These outstanding scores produce more accurate simulations mainly due to a refined model which allows investigating critical zones, such as made by a German car maker using the multi scale coupling option of PAM-CRASH 2G to introduce a detailed information result from casting into Crash model simulation.

“Intel is very pleased that through our collaboration, ESI Group has used our software development tools to optimize the version 3.0 of  Visual Environment to provide new level of performance on our Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5100 Series” says Stephane Negre, Intel EMEA Global Software Relations Manager, “ESI Group’s customers can now load models of million elements. We will carry on working with ESI Group in developing new platforms to anticipate the future customer’s needs.”

“This partnership with INTEL enables ESI Group to overcome the environment limits opening some new solvers opportunity to deliver realistic simulation. Up to now our customers were obliged to build compute models dedicated to several types of crash simulation. Today, thanks to these excellent results, the engineers can use a unique crash model that covers the crash and safety simulation domain as a whole.” declares Jean-Louis Duval, ESI Group Worldwide Business Manager for Enterprise Integrated Solutions.

The next step will be to take full advantage of Intel multi core technology in order to provide a multi-thread environment to deliver the best in-class performance solution. This collaboration between ESI Group and Intel has definitely fully contributed to reaching new levels of performance to help end-users to meet their needs.

For more information, please contact either your ESI Group representative or visit www.esi-group.com

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a world-leading supplier, and a pioneer of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials. ESI Group has developed an extensive suite of coherent, industry oriented applications to realistically simulate a product’s behavior during testing, to fine-tune manufacturing processes in accordance with desired product performance, and evaluate the environment’s impact on product performance. ESI Group’s products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative and open virtual engineering solution known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous and collaborative manner. This integrated protocol allows all the company’s solutions to work with each other and with applications developed by independent software vendors. By significantly reducing costs and development lead times and enabling product/process synergies, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantage by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes during product development. The company generated sales of €66m in 2006, employs over 600 high-level specialists worldwide covering more than 30 countries. ESI Group is listed in Eurolist compartment C of Euronext Paris. For further information, visit www.esi-group.com.

ESI Group - Press Relations 

Nathalie David-Franc                              

Phone: + 33 (0)1 41 73 58 35

E-mail : nathalie.david-franc@esi-group.com