Ansys Fluent HPC for Large-Scale CFD Simulations
Rongguang Jia, Mohammed S. Kamel, Chunliang Wu, Bharat Agrawal · 2025
Advancements in High-Performance Computing (HPC) deployment and software development over the last few decades have established HPC as a cornerstone of engineering simulation, solving a wide range of real-world problems. Multi-scale, multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of complex systems often require deploying meshes that can exceed one billion cells. In Ansys Fluent, various development efforts focus on enhancing scalability and performance to efficiently handle these large-scale simulations on many processor cores. Enhancements in parallelism techniques extend across all aspects of the CFD solver and pre- and post-processing operations. In this paper, Ansys Fluent demonstrates scalable performance for nearly 200,000 CPU cores. Jet-engine gas combustor, gas separation vessel, and full peloton of 121 cyclists are among the showcases which feature Ansys Fluent’s HPC capabilities for tackling problems that have remained mostly unexplored. These large-scale CFD simulations prove the scalability and robustness of the Fluent solver across thousands of processors and billions of mesh elements.