Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance with AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processors
Thu, 18 Mar 2021 16:39:54 -0000
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Introduction
This blog discusses the performance of Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+ on the Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing with AMD EPYC 7003 series processors. This Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC was designed and configured specifically for digital manufacturing workloads, where computer aided engineering (CAE) applications are critical for virtual product development. The Dell EMC Ready Solutions 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 which are optimized for customer specific workloads and use cases.
The Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Digital Manufacturing is one of many solutions in the Dell EMC HPC solution portfolio. Please visit www.dellemc.com/hpc for a comprehensive overview of the HPC solutions offered by Dell EMC.
Benchmark System Configuration
Performance benchmarking was performed using dual-socket Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with 7002 and 7003 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. 7002 Series AMD EPYC System Configuration
Server | Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 |
Processor | 2x AMD EPYC 7532 32-core Processors |
Memory | 16x16GB 3200 MTps RDIMMs |
BIOS Version | 1.4.8 |
Operating System | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.6 |
Kernel Version | 3.10.0-957.27.2.el7.x86_64 |
Table 2. 7003 Series AMD EPYC System Configuration
Server | Dell EMC PowerEdge R6525 |
Processors | 2x AMD EPYC 7713 64-Core Processors 2x AMD EPYC 7543 32-Core Processors |
Memory | 16x16GB 3200 MTps RDIMMs |
BIOS Version | 2.0.1 |
Operating System | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 8.3 |
Kernel Version | 4.18.0-240.el8.x86_64 |
Table 3. BIOS Configuration
System Profile | Performance Optimized |
Logical Processor | Disabled |
Virtualization Technology | Disabled |
NUMA Nodes Per Socket | 4 |
Software Versions
Application software versions are as described in Table 4.
Table 4. Software Versions
Simcenter STAR-CCM+ | 2020.3.1 mixed precision with Open MPI 4 |
Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Performance
Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is a multiphysics software application used to simulate a wide range of products and designs under a variety of conditions. The benchmarks reported here mainly use 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 solving. 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 relative performance results 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 7532 processors. Larger values indicate better overall performance. These results show the performance improvement available with 7003 series AMD EPYC processors. The 32-core AMD EPYC 7543 processor provides good performance for these benchmarks. Per server, the 64-core AMD EPYC 7713 provides a significant performance advantage over the 32-core processors.
Conclusion
The results presented in this blog show that 7003 series AMD EPYC processors offer a significant performance improvement for Siemens’ Simcenter STAR-CCM+ relative to 7002 series AMD EPYC processors.