PowerEdge: Siemens - Simcenter STAR-CCM Performance with AMD EPYC 7002 Series Processors

This article was written by Joshua Weage of the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab in October 2019.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Benchmark System Configuration
3. Software Versions
4. Siemens' Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance
5. Conclusion

Introduction

This blog discusses the performance of Siemens' Simcenter STAR-CCM+™ on the Dell Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing with AMD EPYC™ 7002 series processors. This Dell Ready Solution for HPC was designed and configured for digital manufacturing workloads, where computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications are critical for virtual product development. The Dell Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing uses a flexible building block approach to HPC system design, where individual building blocks can be combined to build HPC systems that are optimized for customer-specific workloads and use cases.
The Dell Ready Solution for HPC Digital Manufacturing is one of many solutions in the Dell HPC solution portfolio. Go to www.dellemc.com/hpc for a comprehensive overview of the HPC solutions offered by Dell.

Benchmark System Configuration

Performance benchmarking was performed using dual-socket Dell PowerEdge servers with 7001 and 7002 series AMD EPYC processors. All servers were populated with two processors and one DIMM per channel memory configuration. The system configurations used for the performance benchmarking are shown in Table 1 and Table 2. The BIOS configuration used for the benchmarking systems is shown in Table 3.

Table 1: 7001 Series AMD EPYC System Configuration

Table 2: 7002 Series AMD EPYC System Configuration

Table 3: BIOS Configuration

Software Versions

Application software versions are as described in Table 4.

Siemens' Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance

• Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is a multiphysics application used to simulate a wide range of products and designs under a wide range of conditions.
• The benchmarks reported here mainly using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and heat-transfer features of STAR-CCM+. 
• CFD applications typically scale well across multiple processor cores and servers, have modest memory capacity requirements, and typically perform minimal disk I/O while in the solver section. However, some simulations may have greater I/O demands, such as transient analysis.
• The benchmark cases from the standard STAR-CCM+ benchmark suite were evaluated on the systems.
• The benchmark results reported here are single-server performance results, with the benchmark run using all processor cores available in the server.
• STAR-CCM+ benchmark performance is measured using the Average Elapsed Time metric which is the average elapsed time per solver iteration. A smaller elapsed time represents better performance. 

Figure 1 shows the measured performance for a selection of the STAR CCM+ benchmarks.


Figure 1: Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Single-Server Performance

The results in Figure 1 are plotted relative to the performance of a single server configured with AMD EPYC 7601 processors. Larger values indicate better overall performance. These results show the performance advantage available with 7002 series AMD EPYC processors. The 32-core AMD EPYC 7452 and 7502 processors provide good performance for these benchmarks. Per-server the 64-core AMD EPYC 7702 provides a significant performance advantage over the 32-core processors.
 

Conclusion

The results in this blog show that 7002 series AMD EPYC processors offer a significant performance improvement for Siemens' Simcenter STAR-CCM+ relative to 7001 series AMD EPYC processors