For general information about solving in parallel with the Mechanical Application, see Solving in the Mechanical User's Guide.
Parallel processing is not supported for 2D Explicit Dynamics models.
Explicit Dynamics 3D solutions default to using up to four cores with shared-memory parallelism.
Note: The number of cores specified in the Solve Process Settings refers to the number of worker executables that the Explicit Dynamics solver spawns and distributes the solution over. An additional master process is also spawned, which means that requesting N cores in Solve Process Settings spawns N+1 processes. Therefore, care must be taken not to oversubscribe any hardware being used. See Notes on Parallel Performance in Appendix A of the Autodyn Parallel Processing Guide for further information.
MPI parallel processing support for 3D Explicit Dynamics models is described in the following table:
| Windows | Linux | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local Parallel | Distributed Parallel | Windows HPC Jobscheduler | Local Parallel | Distributed Parallel | Parallel Jobschedulers |
| Intel MPI, Microsoft MPI | Intel MPI | N/A | Intel MPI, OpenMPI | Intel MPI, OpenMPI | N/A |
You can use the additional command line arguments field as described in Using Solve Process Settings in the Mechanical User's Guide to specify the information necessary to run an Explicit Dynamics solution in parallel.
The MPI software used in a distributed parallel simulation can be specified using the -mpi option. The available options are: intelmpi (Intel), msmpi (Microsoft) and openmpi (OpenMPI). The default option for Windows and Linux is Intel MPI.
Machines used in a distributed parallel analysis can be specified using the -machines
option. The machines argument should be specified as:
-machines machineName1:N1,MachineName2:N2
where machineName1 will be started with N1 worker
executables and MachineName2 will be started with N2 worker
executables. The machine name and number of workers should be separated by a colon
and each pair of machine name\number of workers should be separated by a comma. If
spaces are added then the -machines argument should be enclosed in double
quotes:
-machines "machineName1 : N1 , MachineName2 : N2"
Note: When running Explicit Dynamics using Intel MPI or OpenMPI, the MPI files used are the MPI files included with the Ansys installation. It is possible to specify a different location for the MPI files by setting the environment variable I_MPI_ROOT (IntelMPI) or OPAL_PREFIX (OpenMPI); for example:
I_MPI_ROOT = "C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\mpi\2019.3.203\intel64" or OPAL_PREFIX = /usr/lib64/openmpi
The following capabilities of the explicit solver are not supported for a parallel environment:
Line body to line body contact using Proximity Based interaction in combination with the Edge on Edge option.
Trajectory contact with the Decomposition Response formulation.
Note: When a model contains a capability that is not supported for a parallel environment, the analysis will automatically run in serial mode.