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Running Ansys Fluent on TotalCAE Private and Public Cloud

This post is how to run Ansys Fluent on TotalCAE Private and Public cloud. See our additional posts on CFX,  Mechanical,  and Electronics packages such as HFSS/Maxwell.

The primary workflow for Fluent is:

1. Upload your case and data file, a well as a  a journal file, through the TotalCAE Portal (or tsubmit command line) in batch mode. This works identically for all TotalCAE supported systems including on-premise (private cloud) and public cloud.

2. Alternatively, you can submit through Ansys Workbench using Ansys RSM.

3. Post Process on the Visualization Server or Cloud Desktop using standard Ansys Graphical User Interface such as CFD-Post or Ansys Workbench.

You can see an updated video of these three methods here

Using Ansys Fluent in Batch Mode with TotalCAE Portal

To use Ansys Fluent in batch mode, login to the TotalCAE portal (from your Windows PC with Chrome, or from the Visualization Server and launch Firefox) and select Ansys Fluent. Choose the version of Ansys Fluent to run , then click Browse to upload a model from your machine to the HPC system.

Note to run Ansys Fluent in batch mode requires a journal file, a simple journal file. A journal file example can be found at the  TotalCAE Support Solution Desk (login required), or at the Ansys support site solution #10000024

Your data will reside in /work/<username>/ on the cluster, or is typically mapped as Z:\ drive on Windows. You can do file manipulations through the portal, or by logging into the cluster with SSH to the head node of the system.

Push the “Submit” button, and your job will be put into the batch system. The system will power on nodes to run your job. A job ID will be returned to track your job

You can go to the “List Jobs” menu in the portal, and expand the job id to get details on the current job state ( Running, Pending, or Completed) as well as the list of nodes the job ran on,  and any comments about the job.

Once the job is completed you will receive an email,  then click on the blue link in the “Working Directory” like below  to download your job results.

Post Process

You can either download the results back to your workstation, or you can just visualize the results on the cloud via TotalCAE visualization server web page, and bring up Ansys Fluent in the resulting window).

The high level steps to do post processing on the TotalCAE Viz Server:

  1.  Login to the TotalCAE Visualization Server with Chrome from your Windows or Mac, and click on the “Ansys Fluent” icon on your Desktop
TotalCAE Remote Viz for ANSYS Fluent
TotalCAE Remote Viz for Ansys Fluent ( running inside your Browser, with a browser open in the desktop!)
  1.  Click on “Ansys Fluent” icon which brings up the Fluent launcher, Click Post Process and load your model/results. Note your results are in /work/<username>/

Post  Processing with ANSYS Fluent

Submitting Ansys Fluent Jobs with Ansys Workbench and RSM

Some customers prefer to use Ansys Workbench with Fluent, and submit jobs through Ansys Remote Solve Manager (RSM). Ansys RSM is configured as part of the HPC private or public cloud, and your user account already has been configured to use RSM through the TotalCAE Viz Server. If not, reach out to TotalCAE support for assistance on this setup.

The first step is to login to the TotalCAE Viz Server or Cloud Desktop, and click on the “Ansys Workbench” icon on your desktop

TotalCAE Remote Viz for ANSYS Fluent
Click on the Ansys Workbench icon on your desktop

That will bring up the Ansys Workbench GUI. I have dragged over a Fluent component, right clicked and imported my data files already.

Example ANSYS Fluent Job to TotalCAE Cloud with ANSYS RSM
Example ANSYS Fluent Job to TotalCAE Cloud with ANSYS RSM

Click on “Update Option” and choose “Submit to Remote Solve Manager”. The settings should automatically fill in. You will need to change execution mode to “Parallel”, and fill in the number of processors you want to run on (in this case 64). Select the queue that you want to submit to.

To submit,  right click Solution and choose Update. ( You may need to  first “Clear Generated Data” via right click on Solution first.)

Click on the “Job Monitor” in the lower right to monitor RSM submission. Once completed you can right click on Solution and choose to view solution monitoring or post process.

For more information, read “Ansys Fluent in Ansys Workbench User’s Guide” available from Ansys support site