ANSYS CFD Sees Scalability to 1024 Cores on Microsoft Azure

ANSYS CFD joins the Azure Big Compute ecosystem.

Combustor simulation sees good scalability to 1024 cores. (Image courtesy of the Microsoft Azure blog.)

Combustor simulation sees good scalability to 1024 cores. (Image courtesy of the Microsoft Azure blog.)

Simulation analysts and engineers should be keeping a close eye on the Microsoft Azure Big Compute: HPC & Batch ecosystem.

Big Compute provides an on-demand compute resource. These resources give engineers the ability to run large parallel and batch computational jobs such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.

ANSYS has now followed CD-adapco into the Azure project. Therefore, ANSYS users will have the ability to process their CFD simulations on thousands of cores on demand with Azure.

Currently, the ANSYS CFD solver team worked alongside the team at Azure to ensure that the CFD technology would run and provide scalability in a proof of concept (POC) analysis. Azure Big Compute technology uses familiar HPC technology like remote direct memory access (RDMA) with 3 microsecond latency and 32 Gbps bandwidth, and InfiniBand for both Linux and Windows.

Open race car simulation also sees good scalability to 1024 cores. (Image courtesy of Microsoft Azure.)

Open race car simulation also sees good scalability to 1024 cores. (Image courtesy of Microsoft Azure.)

“ANSYS and Microsoft Azure have been working closely on a [POC] with a large customer to run ANSYS CFD workload on Azure,” said Ray Milhem, vice president of Enterprise Solutions at ANSYS, to the Microsoft Azure blog. “The POC proved very successful and the data showed excellent scalability running ANSYS CFD up to 1024 cores.”

The team tested out various models using Fluent. These models included a 71 million cell simulation of a combustor and two open race car simulations with 140 million and 280 million cell, respectively. The results on the 1024 cores on Azure A9 instances (Intel E5-2670 at 2.6 GHz, 112 GB memory, 1600 MHz DDR3, QDR InfiniBand) demonstrated considerable scalability.

This should all be good news to engineering teams looking to move their ANSYS license from HPC to the cloud. And with recent releases of ANSYS, bringing CFD technology to the cloud has become a lot easier.

“This is part of the ANSYS Open Cloud Strategy to allow our customers to run on different public cloud backgrounds. ANSYS and Microsoft Azure teams will have more announcements in the near future as they collaborate on various projects,” said Milhem.

To learn more about the ANSYS journey into the cloud, read: ANSYS Jumps on the Simulation Cloud with 16.1 Release.

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.