Siemens Advances Simulation With Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and NVIDIA GPU Compute

Delivers CUDA-enabled GPU acceleration for faster turnaround times at lower hardware investment costs

Published: Monday, March 14, 2022 - 12:00

(Siemens Digital Industries Software: Plano, TX) -- Siemens Digital Industries Software has collaborated with NVIDIA to improve 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 for design and engineering organizations.

“Siemens and NVIDIA are opening the door to a whole new era of CFD simulation acceleration techniques in Simcenter STAR-CCM+,” says Stamatina Petropoulou, technical product management at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “With GPU-enabled technology, users can achieve faster turnaround time of CFD simulations at significantly lower per-simulation cost​. This technology will enable engineers working on external aerodynamics, aerospace, building and infrastructure, and civil engineering applications to 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 use of GPUs could reduce required hardware compute investments by up to 40 percent* and the power consumption down to 10 percent 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 turnaround times for the same vehicle aerodynamics CFD on GPUs and CPUs. For GPUs see legend. Compute-optimized CPU instance: dual-socket Xeon Gold (40 cores per node).

Although 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,” says Niveditha Krishnamoorthy, developer relations manager at NVIDIA. “Leveraging NVIDIA GPU architecture, STAR-CCM+ users can now run more simulations, faster, and can gain critical insights for their design and operation workflows without compromising on accuracy.”

* To learn more about the GPU benchmarking, visit this Siemens blog.

About Siemens Digital Industries Software

Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise where engineering, manufacturing and electronics design meet tomorrow. The Xcelerator portfolio helps companies of all sizes create and leverage digital twins that provide organizations with new insights, opportunities, and levels of automation to drive innovation. For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit Siemens or follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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