Platform and Hardware Requirements

Platforms, operating systems, and processors supported by nanoFluidX and recommended and required hardware.

Hardware

The hardware system that is intended to run nanoFluidX must contain a CUDA-enabled GPU. GPU compatibility is the same for both OS. For more information, refer to this list of GPU compatibility.

NVIDIA Enterprise GPUs, data center, and RTX series are recommended GPU cards for HPC applications and nanoFluidX has been thoroughly tested on them.

Note: Each GPU generation and model has specific single precision and double precision performance.

NVIDIA GeForce line of GPU cards are also CUDA enabled and are capable of running nanoFluidX, however, NVIDIA GeForce Driver license agreement prohibits data center use. Refer to NVIDIA's website for more information.

Hardware requirements are strongly dependent on the use case. For production level industrial cases, use the following minimum configuration:
  • The number of CPU cores should at least equal the number of GPU devices. Ideally, the number of CPU cores will slightly exceed the number of available GPU devices to ensure some computational overhead for system operations.
  • Minimum RAM per node is at least equal to the RAM of GPUs combined per node. Twice the combined GPU RAM size is recommended.
  • 3TB HDD space (long-term storage) or 500GB for operational drive. Common nanoFluidX output can vary from 20 to 400 GB, depending on the size of the case, requested outputs and frequency of the output.
  • High speed interconnect for multi-node systems, for example Infiniband.
Note:
CUDA Upgrade and NVIDIA Driver Support
In order to support the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs, nanoFluidX 2024.1 was upgraded to CUDA 12 (currently CUDA 11) libraries. CUDA 12 removes support for older NVIDIA drivers, so a minimum driver version of 525.60.13 (Linux) / 528.33 (Windows) or above is required to run the solver.
Important: From version 2024.1 Kepler generation (K20/K40/K80) Tesla GPUs will no longer be supported.

Supported Platforms

Installing and running nanoFluidX on other supported Linux distributions may be possible, but we do not test, verify or warrant the functionality on these platforms.
Notice: As of October 14, 2025, Microsoft Windows 10 reached its end of support. Following Microsoft's messaging, all Altair 2026.0 applications no longer support Windows 10. Altair is providing this information to help our customers accommodate this change. Altair 2026.0 supports the Windows 11 operating system, along with our other Linux-based operating systems. Please contact your local Altair support team if you have any questions or concerns.
Table 1. Officially Supported Platforms
OS Version
Windows 11
RHEL / CIQ RockyLinux 9.4