EnginSoft - CAE Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2011
CAE Technologies for Industry

HPC Deployment of OpenFOAM at CINECA for Industrial Settings

Spisso Ivan - CINECA (Italy)
Zannoni Cinzia - CINECA (Italy)

Abstract

OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipulating) is a complete framework for the solution of PDE (Partial Differential Equation) using FV (Finite Volume) Method. It has a large user base across most areas of engineering and science; it is widely used in Continuum Mechanics and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). This work presents the porting of OpenFOAM on the new PLX-GPU supercomputer recently introduced by SuperComputing Solution – SCS S.r.l. - CINECA. It is the fastest cluster available to Italian industrial and public researchers today, ranked at the 54th position in the top500. The availability of parallel computing provides an opportunity to simulate problems of greater complexity, with greater accuracy, more quickly. It will be shown how users can benefit greatly from the parallel computing capabilities available in OpenFOAM.
The performance of some of the standard solver available in OpenFOAM will be presented, by testing it against benchmark test-cases of the 3-D version of cavity flow and the dam break tutorial. The analysis of the instrumented code will show the bottleneck of the code, in term of scalability and parallelization performance. Strategies and methodologies to tune and optimize the code will be suggested to potential users. Lastly, an example of complex industrial case will be presented and discussed, together with the industrial production activity and support delivered by CINECA.