Ansys RSM Cluster (ARC) has basic job scheduling capabilities and provides a simple HPC workflow. However, it is not intended to be a replacement for a commercial scheduler. If you have integrated RSM with a third-party scheduler in the past, or require advanced functionality that the ARC system does not offer, you should continue to work with your IT department to determine which commercial solution will best fit your simulation and business needs. For information about configuring RSM for use with an existing third-party scheduler, see RSM Integration with a Cluster or Cloud Portal.

If you intend to submit distributed Ansys Mechanical and Mechanical APDL solutions to a multi-node ARC on Windows, note that each calculation is limited to using the cores of a single machine, regardless of the number of cores requested. The cores on the remaining machines remain idle for the duration of the calculation. This limitation does not apply on Linux.

The ARC system is not available as a standalone product. It is installed and intended to be used with RSM, meaning that jobs can only be submitted to an ARC via RSM from an Ansys client application.

RSM must be installed on the machine that you are designating as the submit host, as well all machines that will accept jobs. By default, RSM is automatically installed with Ansys Workbench products when you use the standard Ansys product installation.

If creating a multi-node ARC, all execution nodes must be running on the same platform (Windows or Linux).

You cannot run two versions of an ARC (for example, 2024 R1 and 2024 R2) at the same time. To ensure that the correct ARC version is used when jobs are submitted to an ARC via RSM, you should set the ARC_ROOT environment variable. Refer to Setting the ARC_ROOT Environment Variable for Ansys RSM Cluster (ARC) Job Submission.