Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing—Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ Performance This Dell EMC technical white paper discusses performance benchmarking results and analysis for Simcenter STAR-CCM+ on the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC.
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Table of contents Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................2 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................4 2 System Building Blocks ......................................................................................................
1 Introduction This technical white paper describes the performance of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ on the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing, which was designed and configured specifically for Digital Manufacturing workloads, where Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) applications are critical for virtual product development.
2 System Building Blocks The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing is assembled by using preconfigured building blocks. The available building blocks are infrastructure servers, storage, networking, and application specific compute building blocks. These building blocks are preconfigured to provide good performance for typical applications and workloads within the manufacturing domain.
2.2 Explicit Building Blocks Explicit Building Block (EBB) servers are typically used for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and explicit Finite Element Analysis (FEA) solvers such as Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and others. These software applications typically scale well across many processor cores and multiple servers. The memory capacity requirements are typically modest and these solvers perform minimal disk I/O while solving.
The recommended configuration for IBBs is: Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server Dual Intel® Xeon® Gold 6136 processors 384 GB of memory, 24 x 16GB 2667 MT/s DIMMS PERC H740P RAID controller 4 x 480GB Mixed-use SATA SSD in RAID 0 Dell EMC iDRAC9 Express 2 x 750 W power supply units (PSUs) Mellanox EDR InfiniBandTM (optional) The recommended configuration for the IBB servers is described here. Typically, a smaller percentage of the system will be comprised of IBB servers.
2.5 Dell EMC IEEL Storage Dell EMC IEEL storage is an Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre (IEEL) based storage solution consisting of a management station, Lustre metadata servers, Lustre object storage servers, and the associated backend storage. The management station provides end-to-end management and monitoring for the entire Lustre storage system. The Dell EMC IEEL storage solution provides a parallel file system with options of 480 TB or 960 TB raw storage disk space.
2.7 Cluster Software The Cluster Software is used to install and monitor the system’s compute servers. Bright Cluster Manager (BCM) is the recommended cluster software. 2.8 Services and Support The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing is available with full hardware support and deployment services, including NSS-HA and IEEL deployment services.
3 Reference System The reference system was assembled in the Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab using the building blocks described in Section 2. The building blocks used for the reference system are listed in Table 1. Table 1.
The software versions used for the reference system are listed in Table 3. Table 3. 11 Software Versions Component Version Operating System RHEL 7.3 Kernel 3.10.0-514.el7.x86_64 OFED Mellanox 3.4-2.0.0.0 Bright Cluster Manager 7.3 with RHEL 7.3 (Dell version) STAR-CCM+ 12.04.
4 Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance STAR-CCM+ is a multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software commonly used in multiple engineering disciplines. CFD codes 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.
Figure 3: STAR-CCM+ Parallel Scaling—EBB 10.0 Performance Relative to 32 Cores 9.0 8.0 7.0 6.0 civil_trim_20m.amg EglinStoreSeparation EmpHydroCyclone_30M EmpHydroCyclone13m HlMach10Sou KcsWithPhysics reactor_9_million.amg SlidingMorphingNopostHelicopter TurboCharger-noreports-nostress-combined-amgopt vtmBenchmark_178M VtmUhoodFanHeatx68m 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.
Figure 4: STAR-CCM+ Parallel Scaling—EBB Performance Relative to 32 Cores 9.0 8.0 7.0 LeMans_poly_17m.amg LeMans_100M.amg LeMans_100M_Coupled_8.06.007.np_6144 LeMans_514M_Coupled_9.04.011.np_768 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.
5 Conclusion This technical white paper presents a validated architecture for the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing. The detailed analysis of the building block configurations demonstrate that the system is architected for a specific purpose—to provide a comprehensive HPC solution for the manufacturing domain.
References 16 Bright Computing, Bright Cluster Manager. Dell EMC Ready Solutions for High Performance Computing. Dell EMC Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre Storage Solution. Dell EMC NFS Storage Solution. Dell HPC System for Manufacturing—System Architecture and Application Performance, Technical White Paper, July 2016. Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
