Cluster or workstations for turbomachinery CFD?
 

Hello all,

Need some advice.

I currently use CFD for turbomachinery, with models little more than half a million cells (one blade passage steady state) and the solution converges in about 3 hours (2000 sweeps) on a 6 core PC. I am about to use several full geometry model with about 10 million cells for both steady and unsteady computation. I am sure that I need additional computational resources.
I am planning to expand the computational resources so that I would be able to see the solution within 12 hrs.
I am confused what to get, single or several high end PC/work station or a small cluster??

1. which would be suitable for my case?
2. which would be better on a longer run for lesser CFD turn around times?
3. which is more advantageous in terms of maintenance, flexibility and cost effectiveness?

Kindly share your expertise

Kind Regards,
K

Have you considered using HPC cloud resources? You don't have to own any physical hardware, or pay for power, or IT management. Plus you only pay for what you use. Maybe be the most flexible choice. Does your software provider allow for cloud execution?