A single run of a DesignLife process can be distributed across more than one computer when run as a batch job. This is done using the MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard. MPI is a widely-used standard that supports the distribution of applications and facilitates communication between the components of the distributed application by messaging.
The only part of a DesignLife job that is distributed is that part performed by the analysis engines in the job configuration. All other aspects, such as FE results file translation, results handling, and post-processing, are performed on the main machine.
Distributed running has the following characteristics:
An MPI application has more than one process.
Each process is allocated a numerical rank from 0 to N-1, where N is the number of processes.
Each process can be run on an individual computer.
Multiple processes can be run on a single computer.
You can choose to simultaneously run multiple processes on one computer, and single processes on individual computers: MPI is very flexible.