Technical White Paper Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing—Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ Performance Abstract This Dell EMC technical white paper discusses performance benchmarking results and analysis for Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ on the Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing.
Revisions Revisions Date Description January 2018 Initial release with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code name Skylake) April 2019 Revised with 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code name Cascade Lake) Acknowledgements This paper was produced by the following: Authors: Joshua Weage Martin Feyereisen The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc.
Table of contents Table of contents Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................................................2 Table of contents .................................................................................................
Introduction 1 Introduction This technical white paper discusses the performance of Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+ on the Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing. This Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC was designed and configured specifically for Digital Manufacturing workloads, where Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) applications are critical for virtual product development.
System Building Blocks 2 System Building Blocks The Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing is designed using preconfigured building blocks. The building block architecture allows an HPC system to be optimally designed for specific end-user requirements, while still making use of standardized, domain-specific system recommendations. The available building blocks are infrastructure servers, storage, networking, and compute building blocks.
System Building Blocks A recommended base configuration for infrastructure servers is: • • • • • • • • Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server Dual Intel® Xeon® Bronze 3106 processors 192 GB of RAM (12 x 16GB 2667 MTps DIMMs) PERC H330 RAID controller 2 x 480GB Mixed-Use SATA SSD RAID 1 Dell EMC iDRAC9 Enterprise 2 x 750 W power supply units (PSUs) Mellanox EDR InfiniBandTM (optional) The recommended base configuration for the infrastructure server is described as follows.
System Building Blocks Table 1 Recommended Configurations for the Compute Building Block Platforms Processors Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6242 (16 cores per socket) Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6248 (20 cores per socket) Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6252 (24 cores per socket) Memory Options 192 GB (12 x 16GB 2933 MTps DIMMs) 384 GB (12 x 32GB 2933 MTps DIMMs) 768 GB (24 x 32GB 2933 MTps DIMMs, R640 only) Storage Options PERC H330, H730P or H740P RAID controller 2 x 480GB Mixed-Use SATA SSD RAID 0 4 x 480GB Mixed-Use SATA SS
System Building Blocks SSD’s in RAID 0 are used to provide fast local I/O. The compute nodes do not normally require extensive OOB management capabilities; therefore, an iDRAC9 Express is recommended. Additionally, two BBB’s can be directly coupled together via a high-speed network cable, such as InfiniBand or Ethernet, without need of an additional high-speed switch if additional compute capability is required for each simulation run (HPC Couplet).
System Building Blocks with customers indicates that there is no ‘one size fits all’ operational and archival storage solution. Many customers rely on their corporate enterprise storage for archival purposes and instantiate a high performance operational storage system dedicated for their HPC environment. Operational storage is typically sized based on the number of expected users. For fewer than 30 users, a single storage server, such as the Dell PowerEdge R740xd is often an appropriate choice.
System Building Blocks For customers desiring a shared high-performance parallel filesystem, the Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Lustre Storage solution shown in Figure 3 is appropriate. This solution can scale up to multiple petabytes of storage. Figure 3 Dell EMC Ready Solution for Lustre Storage Reference Architecture 2.5 System Networks Most HPC systems are configured with two networks—an administration network and a high-speed/lowlatency switched fabric.
System Building Blocks 2.7 Services and Support The Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing is available with full hardware support and deployment services, including additional HPC system support options.
Reference System 3 Reference System The reference system was assembled in the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab using the building blocks described in section 2. The building blocks used for the reference system are listed in Table 2.
Reference System The software versions used for the reference system are listed in Table 4. Table 4 Software Versions 13 Component Version Operating System RHEL 7.6 Kernel 3.10.0-957.el7.x86_64 OFED Mellanox 4.5-1.0.1.0 Bright Cluster Manager 8.2 STAR-CCM+ 13.06.
Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance 4 Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) application commonly used across a wide range of CFD and multi-physics applications. CFD applications typically scale well across multiple processor cores and servers, have modest memory capacity requirements, and typically perform minimal disk I/O while in the solver section. However, some simulations, such as large transient analysis, may have greater I/O demands.
Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance Performance Relative to 48 Cores STAR-CCM+ Parallel Scaling—Intel Xeon Gold 6252 9.0 8.0 7.0 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.
Conclusion 5 Conclusion This technical white paper presents the Dell EMC Ready Solution 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. Use of this building block approach allows customers to easily deploy an HPC system optimized for their specific workload requirements.
