Barracuda Virtual Reactor System Requirements

CPFD recommends investing in a high-performance calculation machine for running Barracuda Virtual Reactor simulations. Since computer hardware advances in capacity and speed at such a fast pace, we recommend purchasing updated hardware every 2 to 3 years to obtain the fastest performance.  We encourage you to contact our hardware supplier partners for excellent service and support from people who know what Virtual Reactor users need. Our support team is also happy to assist, so please reach out to us if you have any questions about hardware.

Notes:

1. CPFD recommends using GPU acceleration for all industrial-scale simulations.  GPU acceleration increases simulation speed by orders of magnitude compared to running in CPU serial mode. See a List of NVIDIA GPU Cards that are known to be compatible with Virtual Reactor.
2. Virtual Reactor can be installed on compute nodes of a cluster. However, it will not take advantage of the multi-node parallel computing capabilities of the cluster.
3. Virtual Reactor simulations can be run on laptops, or lower-performance desktop machines, however doing so is generally not recommended.  Simulation speed will be heavily impacted.

Important notes for GPU acceleration on Windows:

1. Multi-GPU simulations and GPU memory oversubscription are not supported when running Virtual Reactor on Windows.
2. Calculation speed is best when Tesla Compute Cluster (TCC) mode is set (see Setting TCC Mode).
   1. Only Quadro and TITAN series cards support TCC mode. GeForce series cards do not support TCC mode, and can only be run in Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) mode.
   2. Because TCC mode cannot be set for a graphics card that is connected to a monitor, it is recommended that a lower-power / lower-cost GPU card be installed in the first motherboard slot. This lower-power GPU card should be used to run all connected monitors (running in WDDM mode), and the TCC mode GPU cards should be dedicated to running Virtual Reactor calculations.