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6 Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing—Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ Performance | January 31, 2018
2.2 Explicit Building Blocks
Explicit Building Block (EBB) servers are typically used for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and explicit
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) solvers such as Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and others. These software
applications typically scale well across many processor cores and multiple servers. The memory capacity
requirements are typically modest and these solvers perform minimal disk I/O while solving. In most HPC
systems used for Digital Manufacturing, the large majority of servers are EBBs.
The recommended configuration for EBBs is:
 Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 server
 Dual Intel® Xeon® Gold 6142 processors
 192 GB of memory, 12 x 16GB 2667 MT/s DIMMS
 PERC H330 RAID controller
 2 x 480GB Mixed-use SATA SSD in RAID 0
 Dell EMC iDRAC9 Enterprise
 2 x 1600 W power supply units per chassis
 Mellanox EDR InfiniBand
TM
(optional)
The recommended configuration for the EBB servers is described here. Because the largest percentage of
servers in the majority of systems will be EBB servers, a dense solution is important; therefore, the
PowerEdge C6420 server is selected. The Intel Xeon Gold 6142 processor is a 16-core CPU with a base
frequency of 2.6 GHz and a maximum all-core turbo frequency of 3.3 GHz. 32 cores per server provides a
dense compute solution, with good memory bandwidth per core, and a power of two quantity of cores. The
maximum all-core turbo frequency is important because EBB applications are typically CPU bound. This CPU
model provides the best balance of CPU cores and core speed. 192 GB of memory using 12x16GB DIMMs
provides sufficient memory capacity, with minimal cost per GB, while also providing good memory bandwidth.
Relevant applications typically perform limited I/O while solving; therefore, the system is configured with two
disks in RAID 0 using the PERC H330 RAID controller, which leaves the PCIe slot available for an EDR
InfiniBand HCA. The compute nodes do not require extensive out-of-band (OOB) management capabilities;
therefore, an iDRAC9 Express is sufficient. For small systems (four nodes or less), an Ethernet network may
provide sufficient performance, but can be highly dependent on the simulation models and type of simulation.
For most other systems, EDR InfiniBand is likely to be the data interconnect of choice, which provides a high
throughput, low latency fabric for node-node communications, or access to an NSS or IEEL storage solution.
2.3 Implicit Building Blocks
Implicit Building Block (IBB) servers are typically used for implicit FEA solvers such as Siemens’ Simcenter
NX Nastran, and others. These applications typically have large memory requirements and do not scale to as
many cores as the EBB applications. File system I/O performance can also have a significant effect on
application performance.