Using ANSYS Remote Solve Manager

When to Use?

ANSYS Remote Solve Manager (RSM) is used by ANSYS Workbench to submit computational jobs to HPC clusters directly from Workbench on your desktop. This allows you to take advantage of much more computing power than what we have on the virtual labs platform. What's more, you don't have to write sbatch scripts on the cluster, or manually transfer files between your desktop computer and the cluster. RSM takes care of those details automatically. More information can be found on this video.

Procedure

1. Launch the RSM Configuration tool from your virtual lab desktop: 

   Select Start > ANSYS XXXX XX > RSM Configuration XXXX XX.

   

2. First, we need to create an HPC Resource that defines a cluster. Click the blue plus sign to open the HPC Resource pane. In the fields, enter these values:

• In the Name field, enter the name you want to call this HPC resource i.e Clipper.
• In the field HPC type, select SLURM from the dropdown menu. Clipper uses the SLURM job scheduler.
• For the Submit host, enter Clipper's IP Address: 35.39.212.1
• In the field labeled SLURM job submission arguments (optional), you can enter values for Nodes, processors and walltime:  -N x -n xx -t hh:mm:ss   
• NOTE: The values for number of hosts, number of processors, and maximum time will need to be changed once you begin submitting actual jobs.
• Leave the box checked that is labeled Use SSH protocol for inter and intra-node communication (Linux only).
• Click the button labeled: Able to directly submit and monitor HPC jobs
• After entering the fields, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page to save these settings.  The final settings should look something like this:

3. After you have saved the HPC Resource, open the File Management pane.  Apply these settings:

• Select the button labeled:  RSM internal file transfer mechanism
• This will open an additional field labeled:  Staging directory path on cluster
• In the Staging directory path on cluster field, enter the path to where you would like to have RSM store files it uses for your computational jobs.  It is not advisable to use your home directory for this. 
• Under the section labeled HPC Side File Management, check the button labeled:  HPC staging directory
• Check the box labeled:  Keep job files in staging directory when job is complete.  This can be useful for troubleshooting problems.
• After filling out the form, be sure to click the Apply button at the bottom of the page to save these settings.  The File Management settings should look similar to the following:

4. Now select the Queues pane at the top right of the RSM Configuration page. From this page, the RSM will log in to the RSM submit host and query Slurm for the list of available queues.  When you first open the page, there will be no queues listed. Click on the refresh icon with the arrows in the circle to have RSM search for the queue names.

5. The RSM Configuration tool will prompt you for the username and password you use to log in to the cluster.

6. If your login credentials succeed, RSM should import the list of available queues as shown below.  

7. Next, we want to test the configuration. This step submits a test job to the cluster to ensure that all the settings are correct.In the Test column, there should be a button labeled Submit for each queue. To test a particular queue, click its Submit button. This should take about a minute or so to complete. If the test succeeds, a green check mark will be added to the Status column as shown below: