CaseLab’s CFD Solver and Distributed.net Client
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CaseLab’s CFD Solver entitled STARS is quite an interesting engineering application to benchmark a processors power. Here is a grab from their site:The benchmark test case is the AGARD 445.6 aeroelastic test wing. The wing uses a NACA 65A004 airfoil section and has a panel aspect ratio of 1.65, taper ratio of 0.66, and a quarter-chord sweep angle of 45º. This AGARD wing was tested at the NASA Langley Research Center in the 16-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel and is a standard aeroelastic test case used for validation of unsteady, compressible CFD codes.
Our results show that the number of processors didn’t make an impact on the results, probably due to the fact that CFD program is not capable of taking advantage of multiple processors. However, the Tyan board does make a small jump in time on this benchmark. The Distributed.net project is one of the longest running distributed computing projects on the internet and has long been used as tool for testing the processing power of a CPU or system.
The Distributed.net client is not multiprocessor capable on its own, but does allow for you to set the affinity of each running client, thus allowing you to double the processing speed of your units on a dual processor machine or quadruple them on the Quartet machine. We can see however that the processor is the sole determinant here on the performance of the client as all of the test setups show the same results for a single client running.