This article discusses using ANSYS products on the HPCBOX™, HPC Cloud Platform and the benefits provided by the HPCBOX Platform for ANSYS users on Microsoft Azure.

Introduction

HPCBOX delivers an innovative desktop-centric workflow enabled platform for users who want to accelerate innovation using cutting edge technologies that can benefit from High Performance Computing Infrastructure. It aims to make supercomputing technology accessible and easier to use for scientists, engineers and other innovators who do not have access to in-house datacenters or skills to create, manage and maintain complex HPC infrastructure. To achieve a high level of simplicity in delivering a productive HPC platform, HPCBOX leverages unique technology that not only allows users to create workflows combining their applications and optimization of underlying infrastructure into the same pipeline, but, also provides integration points to help third-party applications directly hook into its infrastructure optimization capability. Some of the unique capabilities of HPCBOX are:

• Elastic scale-in and scale-out of HPC clusters
• Hardware accelerated remote 3D for visualization
• Rich desktop experience
• Secure access to resources
• Individual HPC clusters for every user or Single cluster with Multi-User access
• Intelligent workflow automation

This article describes using specific ANSYS products, namely, ANSYS Fluent, CFX, CFD-Post and ANSYS Workbench on the HPCBOX platform. It describes how users can efficiently use ANSYS products with their native GUI and from within ANSYS Workbench, controlling and optimizing their underlying HPC infrastructure as part of their simulation workflow.

Running ANSYS Fluent

ANSYS Fluent — is the most powerful computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software available — it’ll optimize your product’s performance faster. Fluent includes well-validated physical modeling capabilities that deliver reliable and accurate results across the widest range of CFD and multiphysics applications.

Fluent also offers highly scalable high-performance computing (HPC) to help solve complex, large-model CFD simulations quickly and cost-effectively.

HPCBOX Cluster optimized for ANSYS

Fluent can efficiently scale when run in distributed parallel mode and allows users to work on their models with its rich GUI interface along with providing batch execution capability.

HPCBOX Cluster for ANSYS is delivered pre-installed and integrated with the latest versions of ANSYS. HPCBOX’s rich desktop experience allows users to execute Fluent simulations with both its native GUI and in batch mode, as preferred by the user. HPCBOX’s elastic scale-in/scale-out capability lets users control the underlying HPC infrastructure themselves, with no support required from HPC administrators. Furthermore, this can be done without writing a single line of code or executing a single console command.

Design and Automation of Workflows

HPCBOX lets users design, test and optimize their HPC pipelines before deploying the automated pipeline for consumption from other systems and by other users. HPCBOX provides both an easy to use Web Interface for workflow consumption, and, an API to integrate ANSYS workflows into custom applications and/or third party tools, for example, Microsoft Power Platform.

Configuring ANSYS licenses

HPCBOX provides various graphical tools for the end user to configure ANSYS licenses themselves. Easy to use tools let users point their HPC cluster to an existing license server within their organization, or, install a license provided by ANSYS on the cluster itself. All network configuration required for the license server on the cluster are automated and performed with the click of a button.

Visualization on HPCBOX

HPCBOX delivers hardware accelerated remote 3D utilizing NVIDIA GPUs. Applications such as, DesignModeler, ANSYS Meshing, CFD-Post can offload 3D rendering to NVIDIA graphics cards and users can perform their pre/post processing tasks directly on the cluster, helping eliminate much of the data transfer operations.

ANSYS Fluent simulation running in parallel on HPCBOX

Conclusion

HPCBOX delivers a highly personalized, rich HPC experience for users of ANSYS applications. The platform is suitable for both small and large enterprises alike; engineers from SMEs who do not have access to a HPC resource or skilled HPC personnel in-house can benefit from a self-serviced user experience for HPC and engage Drizti’s HPC support and skills to augment their innovation with ANSYS and HPC. Larger enterprises can make use of HPCBOX to tap into additional HPC capacity in times of peak need when time to delivery is critical and procuring, provisioning and setting up additional HPC resources would contribute to delays in project deliveries.