Simulation record smashed

New record beats the previous one four times over and took just a year to accomplish

Software firm Ansys has set a new world record for the most complex computer simulation. 

The company has run its Fluent CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software on a supercomputer made up of 129,000 ‘compute cores’ – the equivalent of the central processor units that make mainstream computers work.

The new record beats the previous one four times over and took just a year to accomplish – a significant achievement. In 2005, the most sophisticated simulations were being performed on supercomputers with a maximum of just 512 cores.

Wim Slagter, product manager of high-performance computing at Ansys, said: “The simulation we ran involved multiple complicated physics, in this case an industrial combustor. We test our software on real-life applications by partnering with the global leaders in supercomputing. That’s the only way we can ensure that the advancements made in the lab are usable by our industrial customers.”

The calculations were run on a Cray XC30 supercomputer at two sites in the US.