Hardware for FEFLOW

Hi,

I'd like to know the best way to increase performance for unsaturated-saturated transient flow and mass transport models that contain 1M+ nodes and 2M+ elements using shock capturing. Currently, our run times go over 40 days, making it hard to meet deadlines in some cases. Due to stability issues, it's typically not possible to have large timesteps, resulting in us needing approximately 30000 timesteps for a transient model.

I'm wondering what sort of ideal setup would be necessary to maximize performance. Currently, I'm eyeing Intel's Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K but I'm wondering if it would even be worth it to go for a Xeon with Devil's Canyon architecture with a Xeon Phi co-processor, but I don't think multi-threading is even possible in transient models? I'm pretty sure GPUs are out of the question.

I've ran some tests on steady state models (for sake of time) using the BiCGSTABP solver and multi-threading does reduce time, but I am wondering if it's just because steady-state simulations can be parallelized, unlike transient simulations!? Obviously single-threaded performance is important, but how important is multi-threading for transient simulations? It's especially hard to pinpoint the bottleneck because I think the solvers utilize both parallel and serial architecture... ? Also are the solvers memory or CPU-bound?

Regards,

Adam

Okay, I did some research and I found that BiCGSTAB is 65% parallelized... Also found that SAMG on the gets diminishing returns for more than about 5 cores; an implementation in CUDA or OpenCL would be very beneficial for GPGPU. I believe the set up time for SAMG skewed my results; with a 1M+ node 2M+ element model, I only got 75% parallelization, which I'm sure would improve with larger models.

So, Intel's Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K would be best to maximize single threaded performance since all solvers reach their maximum theoretical speedup at around 4-5 cores, which most processors have anyway nowadays. Xeons are definitely not worth the cost; 16 threads for a CPU is overkill.

Adam