White Papers
17 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
4.3 ANSYS Fluent
ANSYS Fluent is a multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software commonly used in multiple
engineering disciplines. CFD applications typically scale well across multiple processor cores and servers,
have modest memory capacity requirements, and perform minimal disk I/O while solving. For these types
of application characteristics, the Explicit building block servers are appropriate. Fifteen benchmark
problems from Fluent benchmark suite v16 were evaluated on the EBB servers in the reference system.
The results for Fluent are presented by using the Solver Rating metric which counts the number of 25
iteration solves that can be completed in a day. That is, <total seconds in a day>/<25 iteration solve time in
seconds>. A higher value represents better performance.
Figure 3 shows the relative performance of the three compute building block types for eight of the ANSYS
Fluent benchmarks. For this comparison, all processor cores in the individual building blocks are utilized
while running ANSYS Fluent; GPUs are not used. This comparison demonstrates that for Fluent, application
performance is primarily determined by processor performance. The Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 processor
used in the Explicit BB is a good choice for Fluent.
Figure 3 Performance of Individual Building Blocks—ANSYS Fluent
The bar charts in Figure 4 through Figure 7 show the measured performance of the reference system, on
one to eight EBBs, by using 32 to 256 cores. Each data point on the graphs records the performance of
the specific benchmark data set by using the number of cores marked on the horizontal axis in a parallel
simulation. The results are divided into four charts for easy readability—the scale for Solver Rating is large
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SolverRating(higherisbetter)
Benchmark
SingleSystemPerformance—ANSYSFluent
ExplicitBB
ImplicitBB
ImplicitGPGPUBB
(CPUOnly)