CfdOF under Windows 10 vs Linux Mint

[Roland]

Dear Forum,

I found some stunning results on comparing computer systems for CfdOF. And want to share this with you.

I am used (somewhat) to FreeCAD on Win10 together with the CfdOF WB. Thereby, OpenFOAM runs under the umbrella of BlueCFD or Mingw.
The computer I used was HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 17-cd0xxx, with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2592 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s).
A fairly fast machine.

However, my CfdOF calculations could take like 10 h on that machine. Which I find a bit long.

To get faster, I got a refurbished HP Z840 2x Xeon 12C E5-2678 V3, 2.50Ghz, 128GB (16x8GB) DDR4.
Made it dual boot: Win10 and LinuxMint.
For this machine the two chips can be put to Hyper-Threading=on or =off, to obtain 24 - 48 nodes.
I tested FC19 under Win10, with the two settings for the impact of hyper-threading. With Hth=on the machine was only slightly faster than with Hth=off. The best setting found for Win10 was with Hth=on (BIOS setting), 30 nodes (OpenFOAM setting), and snoop=Home Snoop (BIOS setting).
In this manner, the machine was 3 times faster than my HP Pavillion.

Directly under Linux the machine was fastest: 5 x more fast than HP Pavillion. BIOS settings: Hth=off, snoop=EarlySnoop. OpenFOAM settings: all nodes. Compared with other computers, speed is as follows:

Openfoam_benchmarks_all+1.png (52.45 KiB) Viewed 3158 times

My conclusion:
I shall prefer to use CfdOF under Linux directly, rather than under some emulator inside Win10.

More details about these tests can be found here:
https://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Benchmarks (general)
https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/hardw ... re-20.html (reporting & discussing my test results)

Best regards,

Roland

[johnwang]

Which OpenFoam you use under Linux? Maybe not bluecfd.

[Roland]

Which OpenFoam you use under Linux? Maybe not bluecfd.

I understood that BlueCFD is a linux shell to operate inside Windows. On the Linux machine I installed OpenFOAM directly (outside FreeCAD). It is OpenFOAM2012. I followed the instructions from:

Code: Select all

https://develop.openfoam.com/Development/openfoam/-/wikis/precompiled/debian

Under FC19, I instructed the CdOF WB that the openFOAM installation directory is the one where Ubuntu installed it.

Greetz

Roland

[johnwang]

OpenFOAM2012 was released December 2020.
Bluecfd was 2017-2018.
So, no point to compare them.

[Roland]

I compared Win10 vs Linux for the same OpenFOAM2012.

On the tested computer Win10 was 3 times faster than my old laptop computer, and Linux was 5 times faster.

This very result teaches that there is every point to compare them.

Best regards,

Roland