Video board as additional memory
 

Dear users,
I've received an information that it's possible to use the video card as additional memory to run simulations, and they would run about 15 times faster. If this is possible, is there some way to configure CFX to run serial/parallel simulations on video card?

Short answer - no :-)

Here's a slightly longer answer -

You are referring to the GPU based systems such as NVidia's CUDA (http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html#). CFX does not support CUDA or anything like it, and this will not change for some time. These systems need highly parallelised software to run well and in CFD that means explicit solvers. CFX is an implicit solver (and so is 95% of all the commercial CFD codes) so it will never run well on GPU systems. I know ANSYS is doing a research project to investigate this technology but it will not be implemented for many years yet (if at all).

There is no commercial CFD software currently available to my knowledge which runs on GPU systems. This is a big opening for new players in the CFD market as the established players have such a big investment in CPU based systems so a nimble footed new player could grab some market share here. There are some preliminary open source codes around on GPU systems, surely a more general purpose commercial code will be around sometime soon.

And always keep in mind that GPU based systems will work best with explicit solvers and that means simulations of very fast dynamics. The traditional implicit solvers running on CPU based systems are likely to be best for slower time scale simulations and steady state simulations.

Definitely a thing to keep a watch on as things develop.