Hello! If u don't mind, I would like to know if anyone or any company has been using LINUX cluster for star-cd and specifically what LINUX system and type of server u are using. What are the common problems encountered when running on Linux cluster?

Azmir,

I have 8 computers on a LINUX cluster that I use only for star-cd. Seven are 32 bit Dell servers and the 8th is a 64 bit Opteron. I build all my models on the 64 bit machine and do all my runs on the 7 32-bit machines. We use Red Hat LINUX and have had very few problems. Our only major problem was for mpi use; however using "-mpi=mpich" in the command line executing star fixed it. The technical staff at adapco was very helpful in setting up our system. In fact, they are the ones that recommended LINUX to us. I guess that star has been optimized for LINUX and our run times decreased by at least a factor of 2. There is an article in one of there older Dynamics magazines that discuss LINUX and bechmarks they performed on it.

Tom

Suse is also good. There are new servers at rackable (www.rackable.com). You can slot in/slot out processors if your needs increase or decrease in computing ressources. It saves heat and you need less cooling. It is with AMD or Intel.

star-cd: mpich is the safest choice, then native mpi if you have a good root administrator.

Racker

mpich is no longer the most robust mpi. STAR has embedded HP-MPI (at no charge) which supports many high end interconnects in a very optimal manner. With large numbers of cpu's and/or something better than ethernet its far better than mpich ever was.

As I know, there are some people use inforwrap Hyper cluster for STAR-CD linux cluster parallel computation.

http://www.infowrap.com.tw/e-main-menu.htm

The hyper cluster has a control panel is easy to monitor the cpu usage resource and system temperature.

Hi there,

We have a Linux Networx cluster and although STAR-CD seems to run okay we do not get much of a speed increase across several nodes/cpus. For example, going from 1 to 2 to 4 cpus shows an expected speed increase but once we go beyond 4 to say 8 or 16 we don't seem to get any real increase in speed. Can anyone please explain why this is?

Best regards,

Daryl

That's very interesting information. We'll be in touch soon. Over here, we're just pondering over the idea, not yet implemented. If u have more updates, please post in here.