Scalability Evaluation of the CFD Solver CODA on the AMD Naples Architecture

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are an increasingly important part of aircraft design. They allow in-depth insight into the aerodynamic behavior of components and help reducing cost and time in development. CODA is a next-generation CFD solver for aerodynamic simulations of fully equipped aircraft. It is developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA), and Airbus, and is one of the key applications represented in the European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications (Excellerat). This work evaluates the CODA CFD solver on the CARA HPC system based on the AMD Naples architecture. The evaluation includes an assessment of the scalability on the largest available partition of the production system with the NASA common research model in a strong scaling scenario, a comparison of different hybrid-parallel setups suitable for the specific memory and NUMA layout and a comparison of the results with the Intel Cascade Lake architecture. Furthermore, it demonstrates the impact of node placement and unfavorable network loads on large scale runs.