Thread: Hello

Hi,

I am a student in Mechanical and Aero engineering and i am interested in building my first cluster for CFD, heat transfer and proplsion codes. I also have some IC engine modeling i wish to try... its all in my head... just have to get it down on paper! I hope you all can lend a hand in the design and my education in HPC!

MT

Hi MT,

Welcome to HPCcommunity.org. This is a growing web site for all things related to High Performance Computing. If you look around you'll find some cool things, such as articles on Linux cluster design, benchmarking etc... But, more importantly, you'll find Kusu, which is completely free and open sourced cluster tool kit. Meaning, Kusu will let you very quickly and easily setup a Linux cluster. Check it out.

Also, if you tell us what kind of CFD codes you'll be running we can offer some advice. Are they custom codes or commercial ones (i.e. FLUENT). Are the codes parallel? Do they use MPI? What about hardware; do you currently have any hardware or are you planning to buy?

Cheers,
Uncas

Well there are 3 main commercial codes that are currently in use... FLUENT, COMSOL and MATLAB. I know there exist some CFD codes that are written in parallel but in my case I will write the codes i need in parallel. I do not have any hardware... I do plan to buy. I will most likely be writing the code using MPI but i was wondering if there are any alternatives and which one is better.

Thank you very much for your help in getting this program off the ground!

MT

Hi and welcome!

MPI is the standard for writing parallel code.

You may also wish to look at OpenMP for threading libraries from Intel... Intel's version of OpenMP allows it to scale beyond one node just like MPI..

depending on your scalability needs, some code use a mix of MPI (inter-node) and openmp (intra-node) communications...

For a start.. just use MPI... at advance stage you can play around with the hybrid... and of course now you also have GPGPUs...

PortlandGroup compilers have some nice GPGPU integration!

Have fun on this journey... just beware... once you start.. you may not stop..

Laurence