Does anybody have any recent performance figures for current workstations as applied to CFD? Although "PC-type" (either Intel or AMD) hardware, used individually or as clusters, give by far the best performance : price ratio, the real economic question becomes much more difficult when you factor in software licensing costs. Basically, PC-clusters are very cheap, but require expensive software licensing options. A single workstation using an Itanium II, Power 4 or possibly Opteron processor ups your hardware costs a lot, but you may be able to get away from the cost of a parallel license, and the hassle of a cluster. However, to make these decisions, you need measured performance. SPECfp2000 is an indication, but a more in depth look at SPECfp reveals that the different CPU's perform quite differently on the various methods that go into these benchmarks. The reason for my interest is that the CFD part of the benchmark (an obscurish code called galgel) is dominated by the IBM Power 4, with the Itanium II a good second and everything else much slower. However, galgel may or may not be very representative. Does anybody have any good data to share?

Fluent Inc. has benchmarked their CFD code on many computers for several test problems. Check their website: http://www.fluent.com/software/fluen...ench/index.htm

-Jack

Also CD has a page with benchmarks: http://www.cd-adapco.com/support/bench/315/index.htm

Presumably also CFX has one. Have not seen any opteron CFD benchmarks yet. Could be interesting.

Regards, Paal