Autodesk CFD performance issue

[d.lyashuk]

Good day! We in our organisation use Autodesk CFD during design process of Product(Electrostatic precipitators, bag filters). In most of cases its a huge models, so caculation takes a long time.

We look for some speed up: Cloud computing, buy server for calculations or some upgrade/update of PC to stronger one. A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to use a new PDM server for few days to run CFD on it and make conclusion about its performance for calculation speed.

In attachment you can see comparison of PC and SERVER performence. Final time speed up is about 2 times, and for us it bad result. Our hope was 5 times, to make calculation time of our big models less than 12 hour.

Can you please make some recomendations:

1 Can specialized video card speed up calc process? If yes what the parameters should it have to operate with models which has grid 20-40 millions  elements?

According Autodesk System requirements(link below) there is recommendation to use Nvidia Quadro 4000 

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/cfd/troubleshooting/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2019/ENU/SimCFD-...)

2 Is there some prediction for Autodesk cloud solver calculation speed? (option intagrated in Autodesk CFD)

[d.lyashuk]

There was provided some additional test.

PC parameters Before: i7-6700, RAM 64 Gb, video card GT730 

PC parameters After: i7-6700, RAM 64 Gb, video card NVIDIA Quadro 5000

Result: time for all stages of calculation still the same.

[marwan_azzam]

Hello,

While we do recommend a certain level of graphics card capability, CFD goes not take advantage of GPU on performing the calculations.

It is not clear to me what the difference is between the PC and the server when it comes to:

1- Number of processors/cores

2- Speed of processors (MHz)

3- RAM.

Marwan

[d.lyashuk]

It a bit strange recommendation to use equipment that absolutely does not affect the calculation speed, especially considering its cost.

The comparison as such was given only to show that the use of even an extremely powerful workstation does not significantly speed up the calculation time. Reason is that Autodesk CFD can not use CPU well.