Leveraging High Performance Computing AMD EPYC CPU’s For CFD Applications
Ashish Jha, Jaber J. Hasbestan, Kasra Fattah Hesary · 2024
The innovative chiplet-based AMD EPYC™ architecture disrupted the high-performance computing (HPC) market. AMD EPYC processors power Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications play a key role in national laboratories, academia, and industry for both scientific discovery and a wide range of real-world simulations, such as aircraft engine design and numerical weather prediction. AMD EPYC processors offer an out-of-box solution for accelerating CFD applications. AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache™ technology have an “X” in the model number and deliver up to three times more L3 Cache per CPU compared to general-purpose AMD EPYC processors with equivalent core counts. AMD tested several standard benchmarks on common CFD applications including OpenFOAM®, WRF® (Weather Research and Forecasting), and Incompact3d that each place unique demands on the CPU. This testing included strong-scaling analysis for up to eight nodes. The results show that AMD EPYC CPUs deliver outstanding performance and scalability running CFD applications. Adding AMD 3D V-Cache further enhances performance and can significantly improve scalability. AMD 3D V-Cache technology can also deliver super-linear scaling in some cases, further reducing time to solution. Faster solutions allow engineers to consider running higher-resolution models in a given timeframe.