STAR-CD software is designed for engineers and researchers working in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and provides flow, thermal, and stress solutions in areas like automotive and aerospace aerodynamics, simulations of engine combustion, offshore/marine applications, or any other type of complex but important flow analysis. The STAR-CD solver provides one of the most effective numerical methodologies available in an industrial CFD code with the high level of accuracy needed for complex unstructured meshes. This power is delivered with the speed, efficiency and robustness demanded for practical engineering design and development cycles. Through a tight technical co-operation between Bull and CD-adapco's expert teams, it has now been ported and optimized to fit Bull NovaScale servers and clusters and has successfully passed all certification criteria.

Dennis Nagy, Vice-President of Marketing and Business Development at CD-adapco, stated: "CD-adapco welcomes Bull as a new partner to support our industry-standard STAR-CD simulation solution. CFD is poised to make an even more significant strategic business impact than heretofore by allowing development engineers to do 'up-front' what-if studies and optimization of key components and systems. CFD is very computationally intensive but scales very well on HPC clusters. As clusters such as Bull NovaScale become more powerful and cost-effective, and as CFD methods get significantly faster (e.g., via CD-adapco's introduction of breakthrough polyhedral meshing/solving technology), the execution speed of meaningful simulations is now within the timeframe needed by product developers to gain meaningful insight into innovative 'outside-the-box' new product concepts that previously were too risky to even consider as their chosen new product designs."

Bull NovaScale servers are SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processor) systems built using modular blocks that can be easily combined in a single cabinet to provide SMP servers from 2 to 32 sockets. They can be further extended with industry standard interconnects like Quadrics or InfiniBand into powerful clusters. Bull NovaScale systems have already a very strong presence in the Research and Academic sectors with outstanding successes like Europe's most powerful supercomputer and fifth in the world installed at CEA, and is now entering the industry and manufacturing sectors with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISV) partners like CD-adapco.