[Ansys] Running Ansys on Compute Canada clusters

[Naimat Khan]

That's a great news Kel!

Well done Sundeep for your efforts and paving the way for other users at TRIUMF to use this high powered computing platform.

Thanks to TRIUMF IT team for facilitating this effort.

Please inform other users who you think may be interested in it but are not on this list or recipients.

Regards,
Naimat

-----Original Message-----
From: Kel Raywood <kray at triumf.ca> 
Sent: October 28, 2022 12:32 PM
To: Naimat Khan <khan at triumf.ca>
Cc: Sundeep Ghosh <sundeep at triumf.ca>; Daniel Thomson <dthomson at triumf.ca>; Steve McDonald <mcdonald at triumf.ca>; Aurelia Laxdal <aureliat at triumf.ca>; Alexander Gottberg <gottberg at triumf.ca>; Peter Kunz <pkunz at triumf.ca>; Luca Egoriti <legoriti at triumf.ca>
Subject: Re: Running Ansys on Compute Canada clusters

I've copied this message to several people (Aurelia, Peter, Luca) who were interested using Ansys on ComputeCanada several years ago,  but we didn't get it working.

Sundeep Ghosh, a student of Alexander Gottberg, has succeeded in using Ansys on the Graham cluster of Compute-Canada (now DRAC = Digitial Research Alliance of Canada), with a license checked out from the TRIUMF license-server,.   We expect, and Sundeep will soon test, that this also works on the other general-purpose clusters;  cedar, beluga and narval.

Sundeep contacted the DRAC support team and got the detail instructions on the IP-addresses from which the connections to the license-server would originate, and also provided the address and port-numbers of our license-server so that the DRAC admins could allow the outbound connections.     Steve made the changes to the TRIUMF perimeter firewall that allowed the connections from the DRAC addresses.

I modifed the Ansys license-server configuration so that license-requests from a DRAC address will only succeed if the associated username is in an allow-list.    At present, only Sundeep's DRAC username is in the allow-list.

If anyone else is interested in using Ansys on one of the DRAC clusters, submit a ticket to the Network-Requests queue of helpdesk with "Ansys" 
in the subject, and provide your DRAC username.   One of Dan or I will add it to the allow list.

To use the TRIUMF license-server on one of the clusters, you will need to create a file to your home directory on the cluster.

Filename:   ~/.licenses/ansys.lic

containing the following two lines:

setenv("ANSYSLMD_LICENSE_FILE", "1055 at keys.triumf.ca") setenv("ANSYSLI_SERVERS", "2325 at keys.triumf.ca")

Reminder to all - you can see the current usage of the TRIUMF Ansys licenses by clicking on View-Current-License-Usage at https://ccn.triumf.ca/software/engineering/ansys

Thanks Sundeep for perservering with this.

--
Kelvin Raywood
TRIUMF Computing