Siemens Advances Simulation with Simcenter STAR-CCM+, NVIDIA GPU Compute

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Siemens Digital Industries Software announced that it has collaborated with NVIDIA to open the door to a new era of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. Part of the Xcelerator portfolio of software and services, Simcenter™ STAR-CCM+™ 2022.1 software brings CUDA-enabled GPU acceleration to deliver faster turnaround times at lower hardware investment costs to CFD simulation within design and engineering organizations of every size. 

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ 2022.1 software brings CUDA-enabled GPU acceleration to deliver faster turnaround times at lower hardware investment costs to CFD simulation within design and engineering organizations of every size.

“Siemens and NVIDIA are opening the door to a whole new era of CFD simulation acceleration techniques with Simcenter STAR-CCM+. With GPU-enabled technology, users can achieve faster turnaround time of CFD simulations at significantly lower per-simulation cost,” said Stamatina Petropoulou, Technical Product Management,  Siemens Digital Industries Software.

“This technology will enable engineers working on external aerodynamics, aerospace, building and infrastructure / civil engineering applications, etc. to massively improve their simulation throughput at equivalent hardware investments with an increased per-dollar performance of GPUs compared to CPUs.” 

Running a set of industrial-grade external vehicle aerodynamics simulations, the engineers at Siemens and NVIDIA were able to demonstrate how usage of GPUs could reduce required hardware compute investments by up to 40%* and the power consumption down to 10% of the CPU equivalent, while maintaining identical simulation turnaround times.

Comparison of GPU- and CPU-based equivalent simulations: GPU run time and number of CPU cores required to reach almost identical turn-around times for the same vehicle aerodynamics CFD on GPUs and CPUs. GPUs see legend. Compute-optimized CPU instance: dual-socket Intel Xeon Gold (40 cores per node).

While CPU-based high-performance computing in conjunction with highly scalable CFD parallelization allows for massive speed-ups in absolute times to solution, it comes at the cost of high hardware or cloud computing investments. The technology at hand is a game changer and Siemens is at the leading edge with some of the most credible partners in the field.

"Siemens' Simcenter STAR-CCM+ is giving an incredible boost to CFD simulations by using NVIDIA GPU technology via the CUDA platform and accelerated libraries.” Said Niveditha Krishnamoorthy, Developer Relations Manager, NVIDIA. “Leveraging NVIDIA GPU architecture, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ users can now run more simulations, faster, and can gain critical insights for their design and operation workflows without compromising on accuracy.”