NEC Deploys Sator Supercomputer at ONERA in France

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NEC has deployed a new supercomputer at the ONERA center in France to power aerospace research. Called SATOR, the 667 Teraflop machine features Intel Broadwell E5-2680v4 processors and the Intel Omni-Path interconnect.

The video shows the numerical simulation of the flow of a turbulent jet as well as its radiated acoustic field. The flow is represented by isosurfaces of criterion Q stained by the axial velocity; the acoustic field is represented by the density gradient.

The simulation was performed on an unstructured mesh composed of prisms and tetrahedra, with a total number of elements of 3.9 million, which corresponds to a number of degrees of freedom of 78 million per unknown (pressure, speed , temperature).

This simulation was performed with the Aghora software, on 5768 computing cores of the new Sator cluster for a total of 1.6 million CPU hours. An acceleration factor of 1.8 was measured against the architecture of the previous Stelvio cluster.

In the context of noise reduction in civil aviation, performing such simulations has a dual interest – predicting the level of perceived noise and understanding the physical mechanisms of noise generation – in order to set up noise reduction methods. The realization of this type of numerical simulations still remains a challenge today and requires very precise calculation methods * with low levels of dissipation and dispersion.

According to NEC, ONERA plans to upgrade the machine to 1.14 Petaflops peak sometime later this year.

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