We recently benchmarked a Siemens STAR-CCM+ simulation to compare an engineering team's existing on-premises cluster against Corvid HPC’s bare-metal infrastructure. Because large-scale fluid dynamics simulations require continuous, rapid data exchange between cores, they perform best on modern, purpose-built hardware. Running on our OD3 hardware at the exact same 480-core count as their on-prem cluster, Corvid HPC completed the simulation in a fraction of the time. For simulation teams, this massive reduction in solve time means drastically increasing daily design throughput and getting far more value out of their existing software licenses. 

The goal of this benchmark was to demonstrate how shifting from an aging or over-utilized on-premises cluster to optimized bare-metal infrastructure can transform an engineering workflow.

The baseline on-premises cluster took 1.50 hours to solve the case on 480 cores. Moving that exact workload to Corvid HPC’s OD3 platform delivered massive, immediate speed improvements:

• At 480 cores: Runtime dropped to just 9 minutes (0.15 hours)—a 90.33% reduction.

• At 960 cores: Runtime dropped to just 6 minutes (0.10 hours)—a 93.67% reduction.

For an engineering team, cutting a 1.5-hour solve time down to under 10 minutes fundamentally changes the design workflow. Rather than stepping away and waiting for a local queue to clear, engineers can treat complex fluid dynamics as a rapid iteration tool. This speed allows a team to test, analyze, modify, and re-test a model multiple times within a single morning. Ultimately, this massive increase in daily throughput enables organizations to explore a much wider design space, validate better solutions faster, and extract significantly more value from the simulation software licenses they already own.

Managing complex engineering workloads requires an environment explicitly designed for those solvers. Corvid HPC delivers a secure, fully managed infrastructure that removes the IT burden of maintaining and upgrading an on-prem cluster. Our bare-metal approach ensures rapid job deployment, predictable billing, and a completely protected environment for sensitive intellectual property, including ITAR and CMMC compliance.

By migrating to purpose-built HPC hardware, simulation teams aren't just saving time—they are fundamentally expanding their capacity for design exploration without needing to purchase additional software licenses or procure new local servers.