The aim of this HPC Experiment was to link the commercial CFD code ANSYS Fluent with an in-house FE element code.

Resources Used by the Team
• ANSYS Fluent
• CPU 24/7

Significant Challenges
• Bringing together software from different providers.
• Getting the Fluent process to run on several machines when called from the FE software.

Major Benefits
• Outsourcing to an external cluster allowed the end user to distribute computing more efficiently.
• Dedicate licenses allowed the process to run independently from the in-house licensing and queuing system.
• The enhanced computing power available on the cluster made it possible to run bigger jobs in a short time scale.
• Gaining practical experience on how to run Fluent jobs.
• Comprehensive and expedient technical support on the part of the resource provider.

Main Conclusions and Recommendations
• It is possible that a speed-up factor of approximately 5x between Windows PC and the cluster run could be achieved.
• Because of the collaborative effort between the two teams, project implementation took only one month.
• 3D visualization tools could be used to improve the graphical performance of large size models but given the resources, the performance was quite satisfactory.

This team project was covered by the ‘Consider CAE in the Cloud article’ on the Desktop Engineering Magazine.

Project Status: Complete.