Does Intel Phi helps on FloEFD?
 

Hi all,

My company is looking for solution to speed up FloEFD simulation. Does anyone has an idea of Intel Phi works on FloEFD?
Besides adding more CPU, what else will benefit the performance?

Thanks a lot
Jason

Hi Jason,

No, Intel Phi is similar to a GPU card such as Nvidia Tesla family. The system of a processor in a PCI-E port is not supported.

In general the CPU generations increase in performance every time and the number of cores only help to some extent.
At some point the speed increase will level, for example using 40 cores would no speed up the solver much more than 32. It would make more sense to use a second solver for another project you need to solve and do it in parallel rather than in series.

So if you always want to achieve the fastest CPU time with FloEFD I can recommend to discuss with your team and management to annually buy new hardware and simply use the old hardware for other colleagues that need less resources. Basically handing them down every year.
Usually in companies there is a system upgrade of desktops every 3-4 years and you could try to turn it in the way that you get the best system every year a new processor generation comes out and give the old system to a CAD engineer who needs less performance for example and doesn't need always the newest system.

Also keep updating on the latest FloEFD version as new enhancements will potentially speed up the solver.

And lastly, try to create efficient meshes where it is necessary and try to save cells where they are not needed. For example I have seen models being setup with the automatic mesh settings and no local mesh which caused 3 times the mesh count than if the mesh was setup smartly to create an CPU time efficient mesh. Often the automatic settings can create a high small feature refinement at edges of a body where it is not necessary. In a 2D cut plot you can see the refining cells at the edge and often it doesn't look very bad but consider that the mesh is not 2D but this refinement of maybe 5 more cells in the 2D plot stretches along the whole edge of the model and cause easily 200,000 cells more just on the one edge.

Mentor is constantly trying to improve the solver speed and works with Intel to better leverage the Intel CPU technology. V15 has increased in solver speed and newer version will continue to push the limit.

I hope this helps,
Boris