Installation Requirements for Distributed Memory Solutions with HFSS

You must install HFSS on all the machines you intend to use during the HFSS distributed memory solution process. The installation locations for HFSS must be identical and the machines must be uniform: all 64 bit, all Windows or all Linux. The machines must all use the same interconnect.

In addition, on Windows, you must install one of the supported versions of MPI from either Microsoft or Intel. Be sure to install the same version of MPI on all machines in your cluster. (Solving on a single Windows machine does not require MPI installation. Users running on Linux do not need to install MPI manually).

You will need to set the password you want to use for your MPI runs on all the machines in the cluster. You can either use the batch command provided by Ansys to set your password or refer to the MPI vendor's documentation.

InfiniBand Support for Windows

By default, the MPI vendors use the fastest interconnect by default (typically InfiniBand is faster than Ethernet). If you want to override the default behavior and force the use of Ethernet, you can set the ANSOFT_MPI_INTERCONNECT environment variable to “eth” for the job.