Great Performance

Multicore Scalability With Fluent and Windows Compute Server 2003

Date : 11/15/2007
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In high-performance computing (HPC) cluster environments, using multicore processors can significantly increase application performance. Although the advantages of additional cores can be significant, bottlenecks from other components can still restrict cluster scalability. 

In May 2007, to help demonstrate how cluster performance scales with additional processing cores, Dell™ engineers used the FLUENT Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) application to test a cluster based on Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS). The results showed that, although quad-core processors provided higher performance than dual-core processors, the limitations of Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networks tended to inhibit scalability when using more than one compute node, primarily because of the increase in communication time when additional servers are involved in the calculation.