Hello:

I would like to find somebody who uses FLUENT on INTEL PLATFORM.

I would like to know about intel machines´ requeriments needed to run FLUENT cases up to 500.000 cells with combustion and radiation physics.

(1). I went to see a computer show a few weeks ago. (2). To my surprise, there were so many different types of mother boards on the market , not to mention the different types of CPU , bus, etc... (3). I think, the only place you can get the right information is from the vendor, where the code is actually checked out. This is because the operating system and the graphics system all will affect the operation of the code. (4). To be on the safe side, get the exact hardware the vendor used in their code check out.

We run Fluent on Intel platforms (RedHat Linux 6.0 + Dell Optiplex 500Mhz with 512mb). Runs very well and can handle about 300.000 cells (coupled solver, pure NS+k-eps) per CPU without swapping. If you run the segragated solver memory requrients are lower. Combustion of course requires more. Can't give you any exact number here though. For larger jobs you can always parallellize. There are still a few bugs in the post-processing on Linux, and we have had a few problems with cross-platform case-file compatibility, but in general we are very pleased with it. However, there are more bugs if you run combustion and discrete phase. My experience is from fluent 5.2.3. The new 5.3 release due out in a few days might be better, I don't know.

Hi, For iterative solvers, RAM is more important than CPU speed. Using virtual memory during the solution decreases the CPU perfomance even to 20%. For 500,000 cells , your computer (PC and Unix) should have at least 512 Mb RAM (if you want to use full computational capacity of your platform ).

Ali

I have a Dell Precision 410 with 1GB RAM. I had solved a model of 1,100,000 cells with P1 radiation, but no combustion or multispecies.

Maybe you already chose your machine but I still want to drop my experiences with Fluent under NT: (1) With Version 5.1 an error ocurred which stopped the calculation without having the opprotunity to save the yet existing result. -> Very bad behaviour for a nightime running. With 5.2 the bug was fixed. (2) It made and still may make problems (not on all NT machines) to create non-conformal interfaces (stick grids together which do not fit). I tried the same on a UNIX machine and it worked. Problems of other kind may be added.

Conclusion: For a low budget NT is ok. But if you can you should choose a unix-system, since Fluent is still develloped under UNIX and the NT-Version is still a "2nd-class" product. Maybe the Linux-Version will be an alternative in future.