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PSA Peugeot Citroën uses Fluent's CFD software for its diverse automotive fluid flow needs such as external aerodynamics, underhood thermal management and cabin comfort modeling. A surge in demand at PSA Peugeot Citroën to perform an ever-growing number of computer-aided engineering design iterations using CFD quickly led to a reassessment of the computational hardware requirements necessary.
Historically, PSA Peugeot Citroën had been using proprietary Unix OS computer platforms for its CFD simulations but Information Technology experts decided to now move to a more standardized 400 processor cluster of compute nodes using AMD Opteron processors inter-connected by a fast Myrinet network under a Linux operating system. This combination of FLUENT software and AMD Linux cluster now enables PSA Peugeot Citroën engineers with a fluid flow modelling capability customized to the required level of performance and stability, yet less expensive to purchase and maintain than the previous approach.
"As an example, this new cluster allows us to divide the time required to model air flows in car cabins by a factor of 2. Besides, it will also allow us to significantly increase the number of automotive CFD applications performed using FLUENT within our Engineering and Design departments," says Alexis Scotto d'Apollonia of PSA Peugeot Citroën's Numerical Modelling Department. "And it also ensures that we are prepared for tomorrow's needs such as much larger grids or the simulation of transient flow phenomena with moving meshes" he added.
PSA Peugeot Citroën managed to set up the new high-performance computing cluster in a transparent way for all CFD users, and according to Jean-Luc Trouvé, of PSA Peugeot Citroën's Information Technology Department, "It allows us to standardize our computing resources by deploying a cost-effective universal solution, and making it possible to ensure the continuity of growth in CFD applications we can achieve using FLUENT".
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