SimuTech Group offers a GAP Assessment to companies using engineering simulation tools.  As experts in the usage and implementation of engineering simulation tools, SimuTech is uniquely qualified to assess how companies are using engineering simulation tools and provide the appropriate solutions.

GAP Assessments are designed to assess and address “GAPS” related to:

• Processes
• Skills
• Software
• Hardware

The ultimate purpose of the GAP Assessment is to improve productivity and/or other customer driven goal(s).

 Why GAP Assessment?

• Rate of change in simulation technology is becoming exponential.
• Major software release on an annual basis resulting in a new tool that must be studied.
• Difficult in staying current with the latest features and processes.
• GAP between what an analyst is trained to do and what the software and hardware is capable of doing, is growing at an accelerated rate as well.

 Contact your local SimuTech Group office to discuss getting a GAP Assessment started today!

SimuTech Support™ provides best-in-class "technical support" for all of our engineering simulation software customers.

In reviewing what most CAD and CAE providers consider as "technical support", SimuTech realized that the level of "technical support" we provide our FEA and CFD customers far exceeds the industry standard. To distinguish this higher level, SimuTech has formalized its model with SimuTech Support.

Our goal is to "make our customers successful".

Contact SimuTech Support™ by Phone, E-mail or Internet.

Procedure to obtain data necessary to create ANSYS, Inc. license key(s):

Most of our advanced level courses are only available on a "By Demand" schedule. Please "register" to notify our training staff of your interest in this course.  Once we have sufficient demand, one of our training coordinators will contact you to discuss options.

Click on the course for description and registration.

Please join us for one or more of our webinars.

These one-hour events are free and hosted by one of our experienced engineers.

The focus is on improving your company's design and engineering productivity by making your products lighter, stronger, cheaper to design and manufacture and at higher quality level.

You have already invested in simulation tools or seriously considering the investment.  Now take the time to learn how to maximize that investment.

Note: to view a recorded webinar, you will need to download and install the GotoMeeting codec.

Introduction to ANSYS Engineering Knowledge Manager (EKM)	Tues, Jun 18, 2 PM ET	Register
Introduction to ANSYS Composite PrepPost (ACP)	Thurs, Jun 6, 2 PM ET	Register
Introduction to ANSYS High Performance Computing (HPC)	Tues, May 21, 2 PM ET	View Recording
ANSYS SpaceClaim Direct Modeler	Thurs, May 16, 2 PM ET	View Recording
Introduction to ANSYS DesignXplorer & Parametric Modeling	Tues, May 7, 2 PM ET	View Recording
SimuCloud™ Overview & Demo	Tues, Apr 23, 2 PM ET	View Recording
Introduction to ANSYS Application Customization Toolkit (ACT)	Tues, Apr 9, 2 PM ET	View Recording
SimuCloud™ Webinar & Workshop	Tues, Mar 26 & 28	More Info View Recording
ANSYS SpaceClaim Direct Modeler	Thurs, Oct 4, 2 PM ET	View Recording
Introduction to Fatigue for FEA	Thurs, Sept 13, 2 PM ET	View Recording (no audio for intro piece)
ANSYS Composite PrepPost (ACP)	Thurs, Aug 16, 2 PM ET	View Recording
Introduction to Optimization: ANSYS DesignXplorer & TOSCA Structure	Thurs, Aug 2, 2 PM ET	View Recording
Introduction to ANSYS High Performance Computing (HPC)	Thurs, July 12, 2 PM ET	View Recording
Check back later
Introduction to Fatigue and fe-safe®	Tues, April 30	Register
Introduction to fe-safe 6.3: Focus on Spot Welds		View Recording
Introduction to Fatigue Analysis for FEA	Tues, July 24, 2 PM ET	Register
Introduction to Fatigue analysis for FEA and fe-safe 6	Thurs, Oct 20, 11 AM ET	View Recording
Introduction to Fatigue analysis for FEA and fe-safe 6	Wed, Sept. 28, 11 AM ET	View Recording

SimuTech Group is offering two new concept courses for advanced ANSYS training: Gap Training and Skills Development Training. These courses are designed to elevate the daily use of ANSYS FEA and CFD software to the highest possible level. 

The cost of training is significant. 
The cost of not training is more significant.

GAP Training: 3-5 day training class comprised of a custom collection of "Off The Shelf" training material drawn from multiple commercial training courses. The objective is to "fill" any technology GAPS that exist in your typical ANSYS users' capabilities. 

Skills Development Training: complements the GAP training by taking what was learned in the classroom and applying it to the analyst's daily workload.  Learning how to use a new tool in a classroom setting does not train analysts how to use it in solving their real world engineering problems.  It is the Skills Development Training that leads to the ROI on any training investment.

The rate of change in FEA and CFD technology is becoming exponential. ANSYS is acquiring technology through acquisitions as well as advanced in-house development. This is evidenced by a major software release on an annual basis that results in a new tool that must be studied to take full advantage of its ever growing capabilities.  With this accelerated rate of change, the GAP between what an analyst is trained to do and what the software is capable of doing, is growing at an accelerated rate as well.  The net result is a growing group of analysts whose skills lag behind the current technology and processes.

Whether you are an analyst or managing a group of analysts, any discussion on the need for or the value of training should include the following:

• What is the true cost of struggling with a new analysis when compared to the one-time cost of training (both GAP and Skills Development)?
• How likely is it that an analyst can get an analysis done in a pre-determined length of time and, in addition, learn a new, more efficient way of doing it using a new or modified set of tools?     
• If there has not been a significant change (during the previous several years) in the way a numerical analysis is being approached, then to a very high probability, the analysis process is out-dated and therefore very likely, sub optimal. 
• Utilizing GAP and Skills Development Training provides a significant ROI by investing in what is needed to apply the latest technological advancements already available with your existing annual software maintenance (TECS).

To find out how you can take advantage of this new paradigm in training, please contact your local SimuTech Office.
 

Please join us for our Events: Seminar, Hands-on Workshop, User Group or Open House meetings.

 ANSYS Events       Autodesk Moldflow Events       fe-safe Events

The focus is on improving your company's design and engineering productivity by making your products lighter, stronger, cheaper to design and manufacture and at higher quality level.

You have already invested in simulation tools or seriously considering the investment.  Now take the time to learn how to maximize that investment.

ANSYS 14.5 Composite Seminar SimuTech Group - Montreal 550 chemin du Golf, Suite 100 Ile des Soeurs Verdun, QC  H3E1A8	Wed, May 29	Register
ANSYS Fatigue & Durability Workshop Courtyard by Marriott- Portland Downtown/Convention Center 435 N.E. Wasco Street Portland, OR  97232	Fri, May 10	Register
ANSYS Fatigue & Durability Workshop Sheraton Bellevue Hotel 100 112th Avenue NE Bellevue, WA  98004	Thurs, May 9	Register
ANSYS 14.5 Update Seminar SimuTech Group - Canada 50 Ronson Dr., Suite 120 Toronto, ON M9W 1B3	Tues, Apr 30	Register
ANSYS User Group Meeting - Northern Colorado The Fort Collins Brewery 1020 East Lincoln Avenue  Ft Collins, CO 80504	Wed, Apr 10	Register
ANSYS Fatigue & Durability Workshop SimuTech Group - Northeast 1800 Brighton Henrietta TL Rochester, NY	Wed, Apr 10	Register
ANSYS 14.5 Update Seminar CIARA 9300, Transcanada Highway Saint-Laurent, Québec	Tues, Mar 26	Register
ANSYS Application Customization Toolkit (ACT) Seminar SimuTech Group - Canada 50 Ronson Drive, Suite 120 Toronto, Ontario	Mon, Mar 18	Register
ANSYS User Group Meeting Best Western Kings Inn 5411 Kingsway  Burnaby, BC V5H 2G1	Tues, Feb 19	Register
Check back later.
Modern Fatigue Analysis: Fatigue Theory Class Livonia, MI	Tues. & Wed. June 11 - 12	More Info
Developing a Design Process for Durability Seminar Livonia, MI	Mon., June 10	More Info

ANSYS, Inc. tests and certifies their applications on high-end workstations or servers and partner with all of the major hardware vendors.

Below is the current list of certified recommended processors. At the hardware vendor web site, look for " Workstations " or " Servers " when looking for these processors. ANSYS encourages you to configure a system and send them the specifications and they will look them over and get back to you with further recommendations, if necessary. Please contact your local SimuTech Support office for a review.

PROCESSORS
Intel quad-core ( Nehalem, X55xx ) processors
Intel dual-core ( Nehalem, X55xx ) processors

Intel six-core (Westmore, X56xx) Processors

AMD quad-core Shanghai processors

NOTE: The absolute best scaling you can get is with fast clock speed
NOTE: Please choose this link to view ANSYS FLUENT benchmarks
http://www.fluent.com/software/fluent/fl6bench/index.htm

ANSYS Hardware Support: http://www.ansys.com/ hardwaresupport
IMPORTANT: ANSYS DOES NOT certify the Intel Core i7 processors. These are designed specifically for home use only. ANSYS only certifies on the workstation class chips, Intel Nehalem or AMD Shanghai.

HYPER THREADING (Simultaneous multithreading or SMT)
Hyper-Threading is now called Simultaneous multithreading or SMT. Customers are recommended to leave SMT enabled on their systems but not over-subscribe physical cores for parallel simulations. While some improvement is possible, the extra performance from the virtual threads is not cost-effective and incommensurate with the additional license costs (which are per process)."
Basically, if a section of the CPU core is not being used it tries to run a second task on these sections. For example, if one process only needs to do floating point operations while another only needs to do integer operations they can run both concurrently. For FLUENT, there is no consequence to performance if it is turned off. If SMT is on, and you run 16x (instead of 8x; assuming dual cpu quad-core nodes), you can get an additional 20% or so (compared to 8x) improvement. This is not recommended since you only get 20% more for 2x licenses (license is per process). in this scene rio, leave SMT on and run 8 way. This is the recommended approach.

ANSYS Mechanical: Mechanical does not benefit much from SMT enabled and it is not worth purchasing the extra HPC licenses for the small gain that might be realized.

GPU COMPUTING
The use of graphics processing units, GPUs, to perform general purpose computations is becoming more prevalent. GPUs offer a highly parallel design which often includes hundreds of cores (sometimes referred to as shaders) and have their own dedicated physical memory. Certain high-end graphics cards, the ones with the most amount of cores and memory and the ones that can perform double precision computations, can be used to accelerate the computations performed during an ANSYS simulation.
It is important to note that not all graphics cards meet these requirements. For details on which GPU devices are supported and the corresponding driver versions, see the GPU requirements outlined in the Windows Installation Guide and the UNIX/Linux Installation Guide.

ANSYS Mechanical
ANSYS Mechanical 13 can use a single GPU (only) when the SMP solver is invoked. That is, the GPU is not enabled for the "D-ANSYS" distributed/cluster solver.

GPU REQUIREMENTS
Your system must meet the following requirements to use the GPU capability in Mechanical APDL.
1.    The machine being used for the simulation must contain at least one nVIDIA Tesla series GPU card (a Tesla 20-series card is recommended for optimal performance).
2.    On Windows, the driver version for the nVIDIA Tesla series GPU card must be 258.96 or newer.
3.    You must be running on a Windows 64-bit or Linux x64 operating system.
4.    Before activating the GPU accelerator capability, you must have a supported GPU card and at least one ANSYS HPC Pack license.

NOTE: On Windows, the use of Remote Desktop disables the use of a GPU, which means the GPU Accelerator Capability cannot function under Remote Desktop. Alternative means of remotely logging into a machine can be used (e.g., third-party software such as VNC or other).

NOTE ABOUT TESLA AND VISUALIZATION: If you are using a Tesla C2050 or C2070, it’s not necessary to have another nVIDIA display card in the system, but it is highly recommended. If you are using a Tesla M2050 or M2070, you need to have another nVIDIA card for visualization as the Mxxx series does not have video out.

For information on activating the GPU please see ANSYS Help, specifically:
16.1. Activating the GPU Accelerator Capability Open the Mechanical APDL Product Launcher.

ANSYS CFD Solvers
ANSYS CFD solvers do not currently run on GPU processors.
For more information on nVIDIA Telsa visit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html

HARD DRIVE SPECIFICATIONS
FLUENT/CFX - No special hard drive configuration is required as FLUENT does very little Disk Read/Write.
MECHANICAL – Multiple SCSI or SAS hard drives striped with RAID 0, 15,000 RPM or better is recommended. To clarify, if you have enough memory for the sparse solver to solve in-core, which is quite possible these days, or you use the PCG solver, then the I/O is essentially the same as FLUENTs.
RAID 0 Description
Using RAID 0 mainly for tasks requiring fast access to a large capacity of temporary disk storage. RAID 0 usable capacity is 100% as all available drives are used.

MEMORY
We recommend a minimum of 4 - 8 GB RAM per core.

HIGH SPEED INTERCONNECTS
In general if you have fewer than 4 nodes, a Gigabit Ethernet switch is sufficient. For more than 4 nodes, consider a high speed switch such as Infiniband or Myrinet. The amount of speedup you see from such a switch will depend on your problems size and complexity. Currently, Infiniband and Myrinet are only available on Linux systems or Windows 2008 HPC Server (High Performance Computing).

IB Notes about FLUENT: In general, if the cluster is relatively small say 16 nodes or less and was running just FLUENT then DDR InfiniBand would be adequate.

SUPPORTED INFINIBAND DRIVERS

FLUENT
Release 12.x - includes both HPMPI 2.2.7 and HPMPI 2.3 so it supports following:
OFED versions: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4
uDAPL versions: 1.1, 1.2 and 2.0
Release 13 - includes Platform MPI 7.0 and it supports following:
OFED versions: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4
uDAPL versions: 1.1, 1.2 and 2.0

CFX
CFX doesn't directly support Infiniband but make use of the Infiniband capability provided by HP-MPI. Release 12.x and 13.0, on Linux/UNIX platforms, we support HP-MPI 2.3 and so the list of supported drivers for CFX 12.0 and 13.0 is just the list that HP-MPI 2.3 supports. This list is available on http://docs.hp.com/en/T1919-90017/T1919-90017.pdf (see section 1.2.2 on supported interconnects). Note that CFX does not use HP MPI 2.3.1 by default. However, if there is an interconnect which is supported in HP MPI 2.3.1 that is not supported in HP MPI 2.3, it is usually possible to manually install the later version of HP MPI and tell CFX to use that one instead. The list of supported interconnects for HP MPI 2.3.1 can be found on http://docs.hp.com/en/T1919-90018/T1919-90018.pdf.
For Windows, we support HP MPI 1.1. The release notes and lists of supported featuares are at http://docs.hp.com/en/BA683-90003/BA683-90003.pdf.

GRAPHIC CARDS
ANSYS tests and certifies with the following two graphic card vendors. These cards range from the low end to the very high end. ANSYS recommends the high end
nVIDIA Quadro and Quadro FX
ATI FireGL

NOTE ABOUT TESLA AND VISUALIZATION: If you are using a Tesla C2050 or C2070, it’s not necessary to have another nVIDIA display card in the system, but it is highly recommended. If you are using a Tesla M2050 or M2070, you need to have another nVIDIA card for visualization as the Mxxx series does not have video out.

REMOTE ACCESS - BEST PRACTICES
Running any ANSYS application using remote access software is not certified or supported. If the machine you are remoting into has a PCIx16 slot with an nVidia Quadro FX or AMD ATI FirePro/FireGL high-end graphics card it could work with some considerations. Remember that most servers DO NOT have a PCIx16 slot so this will not be possible. There are servers on the market that do offer this capability. Please check your hardware vendors web site for more information.
Visit this FAQ for recommendations and best practices.
http://www.fluentusers.com/support/installation/winfaq/remote-access.htm

SUBMITTING JOBS TO A CLUSTER

WINDOWS > WINDOWS CLUSTER
Having a high-end 64-bit Workstation to do Pre and Post Processing locally is supported. Pre and Post Processing has heavy graphics demands and requires a high-end, certified video card. See the section above, "REMOTE ACCESS - BEST PRACTICES" and choose the FAQ link for more information.

LINUX > LINUX CLUSTER
Having a high-end 64-bit Workstation to do Pre and Post Processing locally is supported. Pre and Post Processing has heavy graphics demands and requires a high-end, certified video card. See the section above, "REMOTE ACCESS - BEST PRACTICES" and choose the FAQ link for more information.

64-BIT OPERATING SYSTEMS
ANSYS recommends that you run on 64-bit Workstations or Servers. There is a 2 GB per process memory limitation on 32-bit operating systems. Realistically, approximately 1.5 - 1.7 GB of RAM is all that will be available. Running on 64-bit processors will give you access to as much RAM as is configured on the system. To see information about Microsoft Windows Operating Systems memory limitations visit: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
http://www.ansys.com/services/ss-platform-support.asp
http://www.ansys.com/services/os-support-table.asp
 

Procedure to obtain data necessary to create ANSYS, Inc. license key(s):

Run the following procedure on each system that you have designated to be a license server.

You will be asked several questions about you and your company. Amongst other information, the system's hostname, FLEXlm host ID, and ID type will be displayed.

Please forward this information to your SimuTech sales representative so that license key(s) can be created for you.

Windows systems:

1. Download AnsRegSvr.zip by choosing the Windows Platform from the list below.
2. Unzip AnsRegSvr.zip on each Windows system that will be a license server.
3. Run AnsRegSvr.exe on each Windows system that will be a license server.
4. Enter the information for your site and then Press the 'Ok' button to display the license server information. (If you do not know your customer number, leave that information blank.)
5. Press the 'Create File' button of the dialog and select the desired file location.
6. Return this file to your SimuTech sales representative.

UNIX/Linux systems:

1. From the list below, download the tar file for the UNIX system that will be a license server.
2. Untar the tar file (tar xvf filename, where filename is the name of the tar file).
3. Run the getFLEXid utility (./getFLEXid) on the system that will be the license server.
4. The getFLEXid utility both displays the information and writes it to a file named licserver.info.
5. Return this file to your SimuTech sales representative.