Scalable Performance of FLUENT on NCSA IA-32 Linux Cluster

A leading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software FLUENT is ported to the NCSA IA-32 Linux cluster with Myrinet interconnect. Scripts are written to integrate FLUENT with the open-source PBS scheduling system. Scalable performance of FLUENT is benchmarked with two engineering problems from Caterpillar Inc. and Fluent, Inc. A maximum of 64 processors are used to accommodate up to 10 million cells. The Linux cluster computes more than 2.5 times faster than a SGI Origin2000 supercomputing at NCSA. A speed-up of 7 times is observed when 32 processors are used instead of 2. This scalability suggests that cluster computing can substantially shorten design cycles in industrial design processes. Linux clusters provide a promising means of large-scale CFD simulations at an affordable cost.