ANSYS

Note: ANSYS on Cheaha is only available for School of Engineering users. The license also cannot be used for commercial purposes!

The license only supports serial and SMP threaded work and doesn't support parallel (MPI) jobs.

Project website: http://www.ansys.com/

Load ANSYS module

To load MACS into your environment, use the following module command:

module load ANSYS/19.1 

Running ANSYS Interactively

If you are trying to run ANSYS interactively, you can start reserve interactive compute resources with the command "sinteractive --ntasks=1 --cpus-per-task=1 --mem-per-cpu=4096 --time=04:00:00 --partition=short" once you are logged into the cluster via SSH. Please do not run computations on the head node. You may need to adjust the time and mem-per-cpu (RAM) requirements if the analysis is expected to run more than 4 hours or use more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. After gaining access to the interactive session you can issue the commands "module load ANSYS/19.1" and "runwb2" to run ANSYS interactively.

Running ANSYS as an SMP Job

Running ANSYS tools via batch mode may also be possible. A quick Google turns up these sample job scripts for running fluent via SGE. You may find the non-interactive "Method 2" example could work well on our cluster, since we also offer the module load ansys option. Combining this example with our provided template could lead to the following script that may work for you:

    #$ -S /bin/bash
   #$ -cwd
   #
   #$ -N ANSYS
   #$ -pe smp 8
   #$ -l h_rt=00:10:00,s_rt=0:08:00,vf=1G
   #$ -j y
   #
   #$ -M YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS
   #$ -m eas
   #
   # Load the appropriate module files
   module load openmpi/openmpi-gnu
   module load ansys/ansys-14.5
   #$ -V
   # turn off shell variable "noclobber" which prevents data files from being
   # overwritten.  Fluent jobs are typically setup to overwrite data files.
   unset noclobber
   # Run the ansys job; 
   ansys < file.jou >& logfile.txt

Note, you will likely need to adjust the time= (run time), mem-per-cpu= (RAM) and openmpi 24 (core count) to suite your needs. You should start small and scale up when you are confident in the successful outcome. The Running ANSYS on SGE reference may provide additional useful information for accomplishing your ANSYS goals.

Troubleshooting

If you are getting the following error opening "Geometry" on ANSYS in Cheaha

<IBM Platform MPI>: : warning, dlopen of libhwloc.so failed (null)/lib/linux_amd64/libhwloc.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

******************************************************************************
*** A fatal error has occurred within AnsysWBU.exe and it must be closed...***
******************************************************************************

run the following command prior to starting the workbench:

unset SLURM_GTIDS

If you are getting the following error attempting to start up Ansys:

libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

Try running ansys within a vnc session.

If you are seeing startup or graphics problems, force ansys to start using software acceleration as follows:

runwb2 -oglmesa

This may not be required on a GPU node, but for standard compute nodes, this should help.