Scaling STAR-CCM+ to 55,000 Cores on Hornet

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Hornet Supercomputer

Hornet Supercomputer

Today CD-adapco announced a significant scalability milestone for its STAR-CCM+ CFD software. Optimized over the course of a year in collaboration with HLRS and SICOS BW, STAR-CCM+ was run on the entirety of the 1.045 PetaFlop Hermit cluster, managing to maintain perfect scalability beyond 55,000 cores.

The ability to perform simulations with such massive core counts is a real breakthrough for the CAE industry, and a direct result of our close collaboration with HLRS,” said CD-adapco Senior VP of Product Management, Jean-Claude Ercolanelli. “In under a year, this project has allowed STAR-CCM+ to effectively run, and scale, on over 50,000 cores. That is very encouraging, and I am excited to see what other breakthroughs we can make. “The results allow STAR-CCM+ users to gain maximum utility from all of the computing resources that are available to them.”

The work was completed as part of the ongoing multi-year project to benchmark, profile and ensure optimal STAR-CCM+ performance and scalability on petascale computing systems. A number of different benchmark cases were run, ranging in size from 500 million to 2 billion cells, all generated automatically using parallel meshing technology and without the need to split the geometry into multiple blocks.

These results are a fitting send-off for Hermit which now goes into retirement,” added Dr. Uwe Küster, Head of Numerical Methods & Libraries of HLRS. “We have shown that the use of petascale machines for building and solving industrial CFD problems is a realistic proposition. I’m encouraged that through this ongoing collaborative project we will allow industry to push their simulation capabilities even further.”

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