Computational Fluid Dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool used to simulate fluid flow around various engineering models. CFD applications are most efficiently run on high performance computing (HPC) systems with large throughput local storage, low latency networks, and optimized CPUs.

CFD-ready marketplace stack

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure now offers HPC clusters with CFD software that can easily be deployed through Oracle Cloud Marketplace. The compute cluster is provisioned with the following:

Open source CFD

OpenFOAM is installed with scripts to execute tutorials simulations.

Prerequisite libraries

Libraries required for some of the most commonly used commercial CFD applications, including Converge, StarCCM+ and Ansys Fluent, are installed. Just bring your own license to get your simulations up and running.

File servers

High throughput NFS and GlusterFS file servers are installed on NVMe SSD local storage to share data across the compute cluster and maximize data throughput.

Deploy Marketplace

CFD technical reports

Ansys Fluent Runbook

Oracle and Intel partnered with performance solutions company MV Concept to optimize Ansys Fluent on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. By using Intel mpi’s and libraries, you can further maximize your performance with the BM.HPC2.36 Intel Skylake 6154 processor. Learn more about the recommended tips and tricks using Intel technology.

View the Ansys Fluent runbook

CFD Runbook

Learn how to launch a CFD-ready cluster and run some of the most common CFD applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

View the CFD runbook

CFD Instances

As CFD continues to grow in popularity, so does the need to run on robust and performant infrastructure. By moving or supplementing with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, users have a variety of instances to choose from for their HPC workloads. These instances are some of the most high-performing in the cloud, and are supported in multiple regions across the globe at consistent pricing. Although any compute instance may be used for HPC purposes, below are some of the most popular and recommended for CFD.

Instance*	Specifications	Application	Billing	Technical
BM.HPC2.36	Intel Skylake Processors 6.4 TB NVMe SSD storage 100 Gbps RDMA networking	Geared towards applications that are optimized for CPUs only and can be run in parallel across a large number of cores.	Per second billing with a 1 hour minimum. No charge for RDMA or NVMe SSD local storage.	Optimize your HPC with Oracle Cloud on Intel
BM.GPU4.8	AMD Processors 8 x 200 Gbps RDMA 2048 GB memory 27.2 TB NVMe SSD storage	Geared towards applications that are designed to run on GPUs. RDMA cluster networking is an added bonus for applications that can run in parallel.	Per second billing with a 1 hour minimum. No charge for RDMA or NVMe SSD local storage.	NVIDIA A100 on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
BM.GPU3.8	8 NVIDIA V100 GPU’s Intel Processors Block storage only 2 x 25 Gbps networking	Geared towards applications that are designed to run on GPUs.	Per second billing with a 1 hour minimum. Block storage attachment is defined by the user and billed separately.	Rocky on Oracle Cloud
BM.Standard.E3.128	AMD Processors 2048 GB memory Block storage only 2 x 50 Gbps networking	Geared towards high-memory workloads that do not need to scale past a couple of instances.	Per second billing with a 1 hour minimum. Block storage attachment is defined by the user and billed separately.	Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute E3 Platform on 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processors
VM.Standard.E3.Flex	AMD Processors Flexible memory and CPUs Block storage only Max 40 Gbps networking	Geared towards workloads that are cost-sensitive but not performance-sensitive.	Per second billing with no minimum. Block storage attachment is defined by the user and billed separately.	HPC on VM.Flex

*Additional instances suited for CFD are planned for release in 2021:

Bare Metal X9 compute optimized instances with Intel Ice Lake processors and 100G RDMA networking.
Bare Metal E4 instances with AMD Milan technology.

CFD demos and workload examples

Cluster networking

Oracle Cloud and high performance computing

Watch the Oracle Cloud video (2:11)

Altair

Design the difference

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Elem Biotech

Innovate the Future of Medical Treatment through Virtual Humans

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CFD Customers and ISV Partners

Altair Saves 25% Running CFD on OCI

After migrating to OCI, Altair is saving on costs and improving the performance of their CFD workloads.

Nissan Selected OCI HPC to Run CFD for Development and Design

Nissan migrated their CFD workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to bring new cars to market faster.

ELEM Runs Their Biomedical SaaS Application on OCI to Simulate the Human Body

By running its Alya Red technology on OCI HPC, ELEM Biotech streamlines operations and reduces queuing times.

Rescale Partnered with Oracle to Offer Their HPC Simulation Platform on OCI

Rescale helps engineers build, compute, analyze, and scale HPC simulations on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Oracle Partners with Ansys Inc to Validate Fluent CFD Software on OCI

Oracle has been an ANSYS Preferred Solution Partner since 2018, allowing customers run ANSYS with confidence.

Oracle Partners with Convergent Science to Validate Converge CFD Software on OCI

With OCI bare metal HPC shapes and RDMA networking, customers can achieve excellent scaling with CONVERGE.

TotalCAE Public Cloud on Oracle OCI

TotalCAE partners with Oracle to add new capabilities to their simulation-as-a-service HPC platform utilizing OCI.

September 22, 2020

Optimize Your High-Performance Computing with Oracle Cloud on Intel

Kristen Yang, Senior Technical Program Manager, Oracle

Oracle continues to push the limits in the cloud on both performance and cost. By running high-performance computing (HPC) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can get the same performance as on-premises, with the added benefits of being able to deploy instantly and eliminating hardware acquisition and maintenance costs. This opportunity has influenced many enterprise customers to move their HPC workloads to Oracle Cloud. For examples, see Nissan Moves to Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Behind World’s Fastest Supercomputer. The types of workloads running on Oracle Cloud extend into every industry, with some of the most common ones being computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and crash simulation applications.

Read the complete post

Featured Computational Fluid Dynamics blogs

December 15, 2020 CFD on VM.Standard.E3.Flex
June 15, 2020 Convergent Science and OCI
March 30, 2020 The Best Public Cloud for Oil and Gas Reservoir Simulation
March 5, 2020 Running Applications on Oracle Cloud Using Cluster Networking
June 17, 2019 Large Clusters, Lowest latency: Cluster Networking on OCI
January 3, 2019 Virtual Humans on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC
December 31, 2018 Exabyte.io for Scientific Computing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure HPC