White Papers

12 Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Digital Manufacturing—Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ Performance | January 31, 2018
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 2 shows the relative
performance for STAR-CCM+ for the single Server EBBs and IBBs with eight different benchmark models.
Each data point on the graph represents the performance of the specific benchmark data set. The results are
presented using the Average Elapsed Time metric which is the number of elapsed seconds per solver
iteration. A lower value represents better performance.
For comparison, corresponding performance with the 13G IBB and EBB systems were also included in the
figure, where the 13G IBB was a Dell EMC PowerEdge R630 with dual 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2667v4
processors, and the 13G EBB was the Dell EMC PowerEdge C6320 with dual 16-core Intel Xeon E5-2697Av4
processors. These results substantiate that the 14G servers are uniformly better in performance, with the 14G
EBB best suited for STAR-CCM+ workloads.
Figure 3 and Figure 4 show the measured performance of the test system, on one to eight EBBs, using 32 to
256 cores for 15 different benchmark models. Each data point on the graphs reports the performance relative
to the single node 32-way parallel result. The results are divided into two charts for easy readability.
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Average Elapsed Time (sec)
Figure 2: STAR-CCM+ Performance
13G-IBB 13G-EBB 14G-IBB 14G-EBB