Car maker moves CFD work to cluster
A
Fluent product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
May 1, 2006
Cluster lets car maker cut the time to model air flows in car cabins by a factor of two and increase the number of automotive CFD applications performed in the engineering and design departments.
French car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen uses Fluent's computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software for its diverse automotive fluid flow needs such as external aerodynamics, underhood thermal management and cabin comfort modelling.
A surge in demand to perform an ever-growing number of CAE design iterations using CFD led to a reassessment of the computational hardware requirements necessary.
Historically, PSA had been using proprietary Unix OS computer platforms for its CFD simulations but decided to move to a more standardised 400 processor cluster of compute nodes using AMD 64bit Opteron processors connected by a fast Myrinet network under a Linux operating system.
This combination of Fluent software and an AMD Linux cluster now enables PSA engineers with a fluid flow modelling capability customised to the required level of performance and stability, yet less expensive to purchase and maintain than the previous approach.
"As an example, this new cluster allows us to divide the time required to model air flows in car cabins by a factor of two", said Alexis Scotto d'Apollonia of PSA Peugeot Citroen's numerical modelling department.
"Besides, it will also allow us to increase significantly the number of automotive CFD applications performed using Fluent within our engineering and design departments".
"And it ensures that we are prepared for tomorrow's needs such as much larger grids or the simulation of transient flow phenomena with moving meshes".
PSA managed to set up the high-performance computing cluster in a transparent way for all CFD users, and according to Jean-Luc Trouve of PSA's IT department: "It allows us to standardise our computing resources by deploying a cost-effective universal product, and making it possible to ensure the continuity of growth in CFD applications we can achieve using Fluent".
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