Would anybody know of the preferred platform (Sun, HP or SGI) to run the analysis end of STARCD ?!

Any benchmark site will be appreciated ?

Thanks

My recommadation is HP machine. However, If you want to make a movie pictures or animation file using the Animation tool of STAR-CD. then you do better to select the SGI.

turboguy.

In general the star solver scales pretty linearly with specfp 95 so you can get a good idea up front as to what the performance will be on any particular machine. In addition it requires a large amount of memory bandwidth, typically ~1-1.2 GB/s per CPU for a fast RISC processor. This is important for multi-cpu machines as the solver often maxs out the bus and thus you don't get very good speedup.

If you are using HPC then price performance is obviously the key rather than simple CPU speed. I don't have any information on the relative overhead of different networking/message passing solutions.