With the release of FLUENT 5.2, Fluent has led the way in supporting CFD analysis on the new Linux operating system. In a related effort, Fluent and Hewlett-Packard have teamed up to measure FLUENT’s parallel computing performance on HP Linux workstation clusters and to fully specify a supported configuration that meets the needs of users who are considering a move to Linux.

Linux is a freely available operating system that runs on computers using Intel architecture. Fluent’s success with parallel processing on the Intel Architecture using the Windows NT operating system, along with our ongoing focus on Unix systems, made the extension of FLUENT to Linux a logical next step. The growing interest in Linux among Fluent clients provided impetus for the Fluent/HP project.

FLUENT’s parallel performance on the Linux cluster showed excellent scaling for this medium-sized (240,000 cell) CFD analysis – running 11.2 times faster on 16 CPUs than on a single CPU. As expected, scaling was even better for larger problems: a 3.6 million cell problem scaled by a factor of 1.8 when the number of CPUs was doubled from 8 to 16.

The collaboration with HP began with the installation at Fluent of eight 2-processor HP-X550 workstations. Based on the Intel Pentium III Xeon processor, the cluster of 16 CPUs was tested using both the Windows NT and Linux operating systems. Networking was accomplished using 100BT ethernet and, in a second phase, the lower latency and higher bandwidth Myrinet communication interconnect, provided by Myricom Inc. Benchmark data was collected for Fluent’s standard suite of test problems, spanning problem sizes from 32,000 cells up to 3.6 million. Results of the benchmarking are posted at www.fluent.com/software/fl5bench/index.htm and shown for one case below. Overall, the Linux cluster showed very good parallel scaling, with performance that was comparable to the same CPU cluster operating under NT. The Linux cluster also proved to be very stable and robust during testing.

The benchmarking results clearly demonstrate the viability of Linux as a choice for commercial users of FLUENT, both in terms of performance and in terms of practical implementation details. Cluster enthusiasts can find a complete “bill of materials” on www.hp.com/go/fluenthpclusters, intended to streamline the process of specifying a robust configuration for a FLUENT/Linux cluster environment.

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