Hardware Recommendation for Flow Simulation

My impression is that the limitation is the Intel CPU.

Traditional engineering workstation manufacturers now supply only Intel chips.  IBM has its own chip, and they think a 20% speed advantage over Intel is a selling point, but I would not get out of bed for such a trivial improvement.

Further, it seems that all computers today are really business servers; serving is not demanding compared to engineering calculations.  If HP called yours a workstation then you bought some badge engineering.

I am not sure how the improvements that I have had since my upgrade will translate but I had been using a Dell 690 with a single 5160 for ray trace and lighting simulations. The time for Anna's punch holder for that workstation was 110 seconds with SW2010. The new workstation runs the benchmark at just over 46. The best part is the significant improvement in simulation times. A 10M ray simulation that would have run in four to eight hours now runs in just over an hour and I'm only using four of the available 24 cores.

You'll need to investigate how Simulation / Flow takes advantage of multiple cores to know if the 8550 is appropriate. Perhaps the 4850 which is less cost but very fast (actually faster for basic SW operations) would suit you.

Specs:

BOXX 8550 XTREME

Dual Intel Xeon 5680, 4.2Ghz Liquid Cooled

12GB DDR3

NVidia Quadro 4000

300GB 10K rpm SATA Drive

Win 7 Ultimate 64-Bit

SW 2011 Standard x64 SP1.0

In my experience, the parallel execution scaling in Flow sim heads south pretty quickly after 4 cores are used. So get the fastest CPU you can afford with 4 or maybe six cores with 12 to 24 GB of RAM.

I got a sales email from the BOXX guys the other day.So I went and priced a Flow Workstation with the six core water cooled config. They added charge to increase the memory to the 24 GB option was like ~$1,500 if my memory serves me correctly, which seems a bit insane since a 4 GB DIMM costs less than $100 retail - might even be $60. Maybe they can explain why that is since the guy from BOXX was commenting on this thread.

Sorry, it wasn't a BOXX guy but maybe Harold can comment since he owns one.

Bernhard,

I use Flow (2009) on a regular basis on my custom built workstation with one Xeon E5440 four core processor (now almost 2 generatrions old) with 8 GB DRAM and my Thinkpad W510 laptop computer with a Newhalem I7 quad core processor with 10 GB DRAM.  The workstation uses all four cores and the W510 shows 8 processors being utilized, four of which are virtual processors.  On a problem that requires 30 minutes of processing time on the workstation, the W510 will do in about 25 minutes.

I like to alternate processor generations on my computers, so I will be updating my workstation with Sandy Bridge Xeon processors when they become available.  I will utilize a dual socket mainboard (usually Tyan)  with 16 GB DRAM.  Although many people on this forum advocate buying the fastest processor available, I find the increased speed to be sub-fractional, especially when I factor in my brain's own processing time on SolidWorks.  With Flow the number of processors has a much greater effect than processor clock speed.  I cannot tell you how many processor cores that Flow can effectively use, but I think the number is at least eight, but eight will NOT be eight times faster than one.  Twelve core are currently possible on a dual socket mainboard and I believe that number will increase during the lifetime of the system.  The question remains if SolidWorks will improve the Flow solver to maintain performance relative to available hardware.