First Automotive Users'Conference

In June 1998, Fluent and Sun Microsystems, Inc. entered a joint agreement to explore high-performance network parallel computing using Fluent's CFD software. Sun provided Fluent with a cluster of 7 dual-processor 300MHz Sun Ultra 60 workstations, each with 512 MB memory, enabling Fluent to study network computing on large complex models typical of the "next-generation" of emerging CFD analyses.

Research is underway to improve network computing using the Sun cluster.

Performance Boosts

Sun also provided a copy of the Sun HPC 2.0 software, a suite of tools designed to enable high-performance parallel computing within the Sun network environment. Part of this package includes Sun MPI, Sun's implementation of the standard message passing library. FLUENT 5, an MPI-enabled application, incorporates this library in the latest release, resulting in an immediate boost in performance, as shown in the accompanying figure on this page. Notably, the performance with Sun MPI continues to increase as more workstations are added to the network, even at fourteen processors where performance begins to flatten with FLUENT's standard tools.

Sun's HPC 2.0 message passing tools dramatically improve performance of parallel computing over a network of workstations, compared to FLUENT's standard tools.

Parallel R&D

In addition to these immediate performance improvements, research is underway that uses the Sun cluster to improve network computing. This work will examine new algorithms that are more amenable to network computing, as well as modifications to existing algorithms in order to account for the performance of the network. For example, using the Sun cluster, Fluent recently determined that eliminating certain communications during the solution process resulted in faster time-to-solution, with the savings in communication time offsetting a degradation in number of iterations required. Sun continues to support these efforts, and has recently upgraded the cluster's network by providing gigabit Ethernet cards and a gigabit switch.

FluentNEWS