CONVERGE SUPPORT IN HPCBOX

We are excited to announce support for Convergent Science products on the HPCBOX™, HPC Cloud Platform. This article details the capabilities and the benefits provided by the HPCBOX Platform for CONVERGE users.

CONVERGE is a cutting-edge CFD software package that eliminates all user meshing time through fully autonomous meshing. CONVERGE automatically generates a perfectly orthogonal, structured grid at runtime based on simple, user-defined grid control parameters. Thanks to its fully coupled automated meshing and its Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) technology, CONVERGE can easily analyze complex geometries, including those with moving boundaries. Moreover, CONVERGE contains an efficient detailed chemistry solver, an extensive set of physical submodels, a genetic algorithm optimization module, and fully automated parallelization.

HPCBOX delivers an innovative desktop-centric workflow enabled platform for users who want to accelerate innovation using cutting edge technologies that can benefit from High Performance Computing Infrastructure. It aims to make supercomputing technology accessible and easier for scientists, engineers and other innovators who do not have access to in-house datacenters or skills to create, manage and maintain complex HPC infrastructure. To achieve a high level of simplicity in delivering a productive HPC platform, HPCBOX leverages unique technology that not only allows users to create workflows combining their applications and optimization of underlying infrastructure into the same pipeline, but also provides integration points to help third-party applications directly hook into its infrastructure optimization capability. Some of the unique capabilities of HPCBOX are:

• Intelligent workflow capability
• Elastic scale-in and scale-out of HPC clusters
• Hardware accelerated remote 3D for visualization
• Rich desktop experience
• Secure access to resources
• Full PAAS deployable within user Azure subscriptions

HPCBOX provides end to end support for the entire user workflow for CONVERGE with its fully interactive user experience capabilities and empowers CONVERGE users with the possibility to perform their entire pre/solve and post processing directly on an HPCBOX cluster. HPCBOX clusters for CONVERGE are optimized for delivering the best possible performance available on the cloud, utilizing Microsoft Azure’s Milan-X based HBv3 instance types for solving and NV instances with OpenGL capable NVIDIA graphics cards for optimal user experience when using CONVERGE Studio and Tecplot for CONVERGE.
HPCBOX also sets up the most suitable MPI and networking configuration, specifically HPC-X for delivering the best possible performance when users are executing large scale models which span across multiple compute nodes which are interconnected with Azure’s state-of-art InfiniBand HDR network. 

Users can create application pipelines seamlessly by using HPCBOX’s CONVERGE application. HPCBOX automatically proposes the most suitable configuration for every step in the workflow. For example, selecting CONVERGE_Studio will automatically trigger use of a graphics node which is powered by an OpenGL capable NVIDIA graphics card. Furthermore, depending on the model, users have an option to set the number of MPI tasks on each compute node involved in the computation. This allows for optimal configuration with the required amount of memory for each cpu core involved in the MPI communication. 

With the fully interactive user experience delivered by HPCBOX, CONVERGE users can easily edit their input files directly on the cluster and work the same way as they would on their local workstations or laptops. The entire HPC optimization is handled automatically by HPCBOX reducing the learning curve for users who don’t have much experience with HPC clusters.

Users will also be able to track the progress of their simulation in real time within the HPCBOX environment. Additionally, using the connect/disconnect feature of HPCBOX, users can start a simulation on the cluster from one location, and connect from anywhere else to follow up on it. Convergent Science support personnel will be able to connect to the user’s desktop on the HPCBOX cluster and provide real time support when required. This eliminates the need to transfer model files back and forth between the user and the support team and improve the support experience.

To get started with using HPC on Azure for your Convergent Science products get in touch with HPCBOX support to discuss further. Please use this Contact Form to get in touch!

Convergent Science (www.convergecfd.com) is an innovative, rapidly expanding computational fluid dynamics (CFD) company. Our flagship product, CONVERGE CFD software, eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the simulation process. Founded in 1997 by graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Convergent Science was a CFD consulting company in its early years. In 2008, the first CONVERGE licenses were sold and the company transitioned to a CFD software company. Convergent Science remains headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, with offices in the United States, Europe, and India and distributors around the globe.

Toronto, Canada based Drizti (www.drizti.com) delivers Personal Supercomputing.  We believe, access, and use of a supercomputer should be as straightforward as using a personal computer. We’ve set out to upgrade the supercomputing experience for users with our expertise of High Performance Computing(HPC), High Throughput Computing, distributed system architecture and HPC cloud design.
We aim to make scalable computing accessible to every innovator, helping them compete and innovate with the same freedom they enjoy on their personal workstations and laptops. Drizti’s HPCBOX platform delivers the same rich desktop experience they are used to when building complex products and applications locally and empowers them with workflow capabilities to streamline their application pipelines and automatically optimizes the underlying HPC infrastructure for every step in the workflow.