An evaluator is an agent running on a compute resource to render its hardware and software available for simulation work. Evaluators process simulation tasks, converting inputs to outputs.
You can set up evaluators on multiple machines to widen the available range of operating systems, applications, and hardware profiles, achieving a heterogeneous distributed computing setup.
The evaluator is an executable that must be started on a resource. Evaluators must be configured to connect to the controller machine where Ansys HPC Platform Core Services are deployed. This enables evaluators to talk to the Job Management Service and other services to perform its tasks. The single source of truth in terms of its configuration is the evaluator's configuration file.
On startup, an evaluator:
Reads its configuration file
Signs in to Keycloak (the authorization service)
Registers itself with the Resource Management Service
Listens to the Resource Management Service for configuration changes and updates the configuration file as needed
Once evaluators are registered with the Resource Management Service, they start to look for work from the datastore (Job Management Service).
When they pull work from the Job Management Service, they perform side-car functions such as transferring files and starting solvers via command line or execution scripts.
