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By Nancy Fontaine, Fluent Inc.
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The HP Integrity Superdome
Donaldson Company, Inc. is a leading creator of filtration systems and replacement parts for industries such as automotive, electronics, and agriculture. A technology-driven company, Donaldson is committed to innovative research and development. Part of that commitment includes their long-standing use of CFD on high performance computers. Donaldson has been a Fluent customer since the early 1980s and has run on HP supercomputers since the mid 1990s.
The mesh file used for a simulation of a Donaldson air filter. Dirty air enters at left and moves to the right, where it encounters vanes. Dirt particles spin to the outside, leaving clean air to pass through the dark cone, while the dirt particles leave through the surrounding annulus
FLUENT use has grown steadily at Donaldson. In contrast to the routine pressure drop problems they ran in the past, the engineers at Donaldson today are doing more heat transfer and design work, putting pressure on the hardware to keep up. Rich Kunde, Senior CAE Engineer at Donaldson, says, "We have more users doing larger and more complicated projects than ever before, so turnaround time was becoming an issue."
Pathlines, colored by velocity, show how the air enters uniformly and splits as it passes through the vane region. Clean air enters the inner conical section at high velocity, while dirty air swirls around the annular region at lower velocity before exiting from the filter
In the summer of 2004, Donaldson upgraded their HP server to an HP Integrity Superdome server, a 32-Itanium-processor system running HP-UX. The upgrade doubled the number of processors and increased the processing speed of the CPUs running FLUENT. After installing the hardware and software, Donaldson ran benchmarking tests and found that FLUENT was not running as fast as they had hoped. Enter Mark Kelly, HP's technical engineer for FLUENT. He worked with Fluent developers to sleuth out problems and come up with answers.
Static pressure contours shown on two planes and on the vanes. The RSM turbulence model was used for the simulation, and produced the anticipated symmetry in the pressure field on the two planes
Mark says, "The problem, which is somewhat generic to ccNUMA machines like the Superdome, was with memory management. After studying it a bit, I came up with a solution - to dynamically and flexibly schedule the FLUENT processes to allocate and access their memory only locally, so memory performance is optimal and consistent every time. This solution was installed at Donaldson and has been so successful, we have decided to apply for a patent. It has been pretty exciting for me."
Donaldson gained a 6x performance improvement, and Rich Kunde is quite pleased with the new arrangement. "Now we can run more jobs in parallel and get more simulations done in less time," he says. His team is using FLUENT to build virtual prototypes of mufflers, which allows them to cut down the number of physical prototypes. And Rich is now using FLUENT to redesign "something no one thought could be improved." Thanks to Mark Kelly and Fluent engineers, revising the standard is within Donaldson's reach.
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