[Spanner]

I have five computers, one i5 dell workstation with 32 gb 1600hz ram, two Q 9650 hp with 16 gb 1300hz, two Q 9550 with 8 gb 1060hz each. Can I make a cluster of three or five for use in fluent, cfx, cfd softwares.

[Spanner]

I have z 800 with 1300hz 92 gb ram, two xenon 5650, quadro 4000 4 gb, two sas drives on raid zero. Can it be included in cluster as head.

[flotus1]

You can create a cluster with ANY type of hardware, it does not have to be homogeneous.
However, on a cluster with heterogeneous hardware you will face problems with load balancing, i.e. the slowest node will limit total performance, faster nodes will have to wait until the slower ones are finished iterating. There should be ways to to circumvent this, for example assigning smaller MPI domains to slower nodes. But I have no experience how to do this in Ansys simulation software. Maybe someone else can give you a hint where to find this information.

[Spanner]

Thank you Sir

[Christophe]

I've linked multiple high end desktops up before and used CFX. You can in your hostinfo.ccl file assign relative processor speeds to each computer to account for the different speeds, which I believe biases the partition sizes.

However, this "cluster" didn't work great even with 10 Gig E interconnects. Adding the third computer didn't reduce solver time at all.

Also, when we updated to a new CFX version and thus a new MPI version, I got segmentation violation errors trying to re run our benchmark file.

You'll need expensive ANSYS HPC licenses to use multiple cores.

[Spanner]

Thanks Sir for information in detail. I will get hpc for year from my college