White Papers
33 Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance
4.5 CD-adapco STAR-CCM+
CD-adapco, a Siemens Business, produces STAR-CCM+ software. STAR-CCM+ is used in many
engineering disciplines to simulate a wide range of physics. STAR-CCM+ is often used for Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and to simulate heat transfer, chemical reaction, combustion, solid transport,
acoustics, and Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI).
CFD applications typically scale well across multiple processor cores and servers, use moderate amounts
of memory per core, and perform minimal disk I/O while solving. For applications with these
characteristics, the Explicit building block servers are appropriate.
Fifteen benchmark problems from the STAR-CCM+ benchmark suite were evaluated on the EBB servers in
the reference system.
The results for STAR-CCM+ are presented by using the Average Elapsed Time metric which is the number
of elapsed seconds per solver iteration. A lower value represents better performance.
Figure 25 shows the relative performance of the three compute building block types for eight of the STAR-
CCM+ benchmarks. For this comparison, all processor cores in the individual building blocks are utilized
while running STAR-CCM+; GPUs are not used. This comparison demonstrates that for STAR-CCM+,
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 STAR-CCM+. However, the Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4
processor used in the Implicit GPGPU BB also provides good performance.
Figure 25 Performance of Individual Building Blocks—CD-adapco STAR-CCM+
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AverageElapsedTime(lowerisbetter)
Benchmark
SingleSystemPerformance—CD‐adapcoSTAR‐CCM+
ExplicitBB
ImplicitBB
ImplicitGPGPUBB
(CPUOnly)