For the CONVERGE solver, the amount of recommended RAM depends on the size of the domain; the level of grid refinement; the number of species, passives, and reactions in the mechanism; and other simulation-specific criteria. A small, simple simulation (e.g., an engine sector case) can be efficiently executed in serial on a single machine with less than 4 GB of RAM. Larger simulations (e.g., a port-fuel injected, full-cylinder simulation using the SAGE detailed chemistry solver) may require several multi-core machines to achieve a solution in a reasonable time.
CONVERGE 3.0+ supports any hardware architecture that uses the x86-64 instruction set. CONVERGE is designed for consumer-class hardware and does not use enterprise-class additions to that instruction set. Contact the Convergent Science Applications team to discuss processor selection.
We recommend running CONVERGE on a parallel file system such as Lustre or BeeGFS. If you are running CONVERGE on an asynchronous file system such as CIFS, we recommend using a hint file for your MPI library with the format shown in Figure 5 below. Set the mpi_control > io_hints_filename parameter in inputs.in to the name of this file. Refer to the CONVERGE Manual for more information about inputs.in.
For optimal geometry rendering, run CONVERGE Studio on a machine with OpenGL-compatible video drivers (3.3+). If necessary, you can use the -o command line option to run CONVERGE Studio 3.0 with an older rendering method on machines with OpenGL 1.1 support (e.g., virtual Windows machines). For CONVERGE Studio 3.1+, the -o command line option does not work and OpenGL 3.3+ is required. Refer to the CONVERGE Studio Manual for more information about command line options for CONVERGE Studio.
To manipulate a geometry in CONVERGE Studio, we recommend the minimum RAM listed below in Table 13.
Table 13: RAM recommendations for manipulating geometries in CONVERGE Studio.
Triangles in geometry |
Recommended minimum RAM |
10,000 |
200 MB |
120,000 |
475 MB |
200,000 |
650 MB |
400,000 |
1 GB |
800,000 |
1.8 GB |
1,000,000 |
2 GB |
Table 14 below lists the MPI (Message Passaging Interface) support packages that can be used to execute the solver in parallel. Other MPI packages are not supported.
Earlier versions of HPC-X, Intel MPI, MPICH, MS-MPI, and Open MPI are not supported.
For multi-node simulations, CONVERGE works best with a high-performance interconnect such as InfiniBand or Omni-Path. The HPC-X, Intel MPI, and Open MPI packages that are included with the CONVERGE solver work with InfiniBand automatically. We do not recommend using HPC-X unless you are running on InfiniBand with NVIDIA InfiniBand cards, for which HPC-X was specifically developed.