Our HPC team has been hard at work upgrading Bramble’s compute fleet. That work is nearly complete and the results are in. The upshot? Simulations on bramble are now significantly faster, and that means real cost savings for you.
Here’s what’s changed, and what it means for your engineering workflows.
What have we upgraded?
This year, we’ve made four major improvements to our HPC systems. Each of these changes helps squeeze more performance out of every core. Combined, the effect is dramatic:
1. All simulations now run on solid-state drives (SSDs)
Drastically reducing I/O bottlenecks.
2. We’ve upgraded network interfaces to 10Gb/s
Improving node-to-node and storage communication speeds.
3. Clusters now run on the latest Rocky Linux OS
Bringing stability, compatibility, and performance improvements.
4. We’ve upgraded the message passing interface (MPI)
Reducing communication overhead in parallel workloads.
Benchmarking results
As always, we validated the upgrades by running a suite of OpenFOAM benchmarks designed to mirror real-world bramble workloads.
- Core counts tested: 96, 192, and 384
- Mesh sizes: 80M, 140M, and 200M cells
- Model: The DrivAer Model, steady-state RANS with k-omega SST
- Run length: 4000 iterations, including mesh generation with snappyHexMesh
We captured both simulation time in hours and total cost (£) for each case before and after the upgrades.
Key takeaways
Faster simulations
Across the board, simulations are running faster.
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A 140-million cell model on 192 cores (our most common case) now runs 17% faster.
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At 96 cores, you’ll still see a 7% improvement on the same case.
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The biggest gains? At 384 cores, where a 140M cell model runs 31% faster
Improved scalability
Previously, doubling core count didn’t always pay off, especially with smaller meshes. For example:
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A 140M cell model running on 384 cores used to cost £23 more than on 192 cores.
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After the upgrades? That cost difference is down to just £4, thanks to improved parallel scaling.
What does this mean for you?
In short: faster turnaround times and lower simulation costs, with no change to our pricing.
bramble’s OpenFOAM pricing remains at just £0.0615/core-hour, and we’re passing every bit of these performance gains directly to you.
Whether you’re running aerodynamic studies, cooling simulations, or something more niche, you’ll now get results quicker, and pay less to get them.
Let us know how you get on with the improved performance. As always, we’re here to help.
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