Internal combustion engine modelled using Ansys Fluent
Ansys and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have scaled Ansys Fluent, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, to a whopping 36,000 compute cores.
Ansys says that this industry first could lead to greater efficiencies and increased innovation throughout manufacturers’ product development processes by allowing firms to consider more design variants.
“We’re connecting all the dots,” said Ahmed Taha, the NCSA senior computational resource coordinator who led this extreme benchmarking project. “NCSA is unique in connecting the industrial users, the hardware and software vendors, and the domain expertise of our staff.
“In addition, this level of scalability for a commercial fluid dynamics solver is unprecedented on our system, especially considering the complexity of the model physics with transient, turbulent flow, chemical species transport and multiple non-reacting flows.”
Ansys and NCSA plan to continue exploring the limits of scale-out computing, including testing and improving the scaling of Ansys fluid dynamics models involving even more complex physics. Other collaborative efforts include running Fluent on Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as testing the supercomputing limits for applications such as turbomachinery using Ansys CFX.
