Ansys

The Ansys engineering simulation tools are installed in both the Niagara and CC software stacks.

Getting a license

Licenses are provided by CMC Microsystems. Canadian students and faculty can register at this page.

Once you have an account, you must contact CMC and tell them you want to use the Ansys tools on Niagara, and give them your SciNet username.

Running using the Niagara installation

Ansys 2020R2

Commercial modules can only be accessed using the 'module use' command.

module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load ansys/2020r2

Programs available:

• fluent
• ansysedt
• mapdl
• ...

You can use the Ansys graphical tools to set up your problem, but you cannot use the graphical tools to submit your job. The job must be submitted to the scheduler for running.

Setting up your .mw directory

Ansys will attempt to write to your $HOME/.mw directory. This will work when you are testing your workflow on the login nodes, because they can write to $HOME. However, recall that the compute nodes cannot write to the /home filesystem. If you attempt to run Ansys from a compute node using the default configuration, it will fail because Ansys cannot write to $HOME/.mw.

The solution is to create an alternative directory called $SCRATCH/.mw, and create a soft link from $HOME/.mw to $SCRATCH/.mw:

mkdir $SCRATCH/.mw
ln -s $SCRATCH/.mw $HOME/.mw

This will fool Ansys into thinking it is writing to $HOME/.mw, when in fact it is writing to $SCRATCH/.mw. This command only needs to be run once.

Running ansys202

Example submission script for a job running on 1 node, with max walltime of 11 hours:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=40
#SBATCH --time=11:00:00
#SBATCH --job-name test

module use /scinet/niagara/software/commercial/modules
module load ansys/2020r2

# DIRECTORY TO RUN - $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR is directory job was submitted from
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

machines=$(srun bash -c 'hostname -s' | sort | uniq | awk '{print $1 ":" 40}' | paste -s -d ':')
ansys202 -b -j JOBNAME -dis -machines "$machines" -i ansys.in