Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

Tablet Computing Performance and Battery Life

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image of ANSYS Mechanical running on a tabletIn the first part of this two-part post about tablet computing and running ANSYS Mechanical, I laid out the specs of each of the tablets I tested. Now I’ll take a deeper dive and compare their performance related to computation and battery life.

Tablet Computing Performance Study

When comparing the performance of these two tablets, I used a high-end workstation as a baseline for which to compare the results, since a majority of engineers still perform FEA simulations on workstations or servers. This workstation contains two Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors (2.93 GHz), 128 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB SSD; it runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7. I ran ANSYS simulations with two different equation solvers: sparse direct and PCG iterative. The sparse direct solver is computationally demanding and requires high compute rates for good performance. The PCG iterative solver works differently and requires high-memory bandwidth to achieve strong performance. Some interesting data came from these runs. Continue reading →

Tablet Computing and ANSYS Mechanical

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You may recall my blog titled “From Supercomputers to Handhelds,” which discussed the concept of tablet computing capably running engineering simulations. As I mentioned, the tablet space is quickly evolving. My explorations continue on this subject today.

Looking back across time, technology advances have resulted in increased performance of computers relative to their size. When ANSYS was founded in 1970, finite element analysis (FEA) simulations were typically performed on large mainframes that filled entire rooms — these were the supercomputers of that era. Such large systems were necessary to run compute-intensive programs such as ANSYS software.

By the early 1990s, ANSYS simulations could be performed on personal computers (PCs). In those years, simulations on PCs were not nearly as large and complex as those being solved on larger servers, but PCs continued to evolve over time.

More recently, the distributed solver in the ANSYS Mechanical product family was developed to allow engineers to run FEA simulations on large clusters, which is the hardware of choice for today’s supercomputers. In fact, in 2008 several mechanical simulations were performed on one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world, using the Distributed ANSYS capability with calculations reaching over 1 Teraflop (over 1 trillion floating point operations per second).

Enough history. The purpose of this blog is to demonstrate that while ANSYS Mechanical software supports such speed and complexity required for the most numerically challenging and hardware-resource-intensive simulations, the power of a supercomputer is available in a device that fits into the palm of your hand. Continue reading →

How To Make MATLAB Apps For Fluent

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I have a friend, who is also an ANSYS Fluent user, who asked me a simple question: “Why, in an era when everything is running on the ‘cloud’, can’t I have Fluent running on the cloud and just check on it whenever I want from my own MATLAB® program?”

Actually, you can. It’s as simple as cooking. I promise. In fact, it’s a simple recipe you can cook up with less than 20 lines of MATLAB code. This will be a simple example showing how to request a summarized report and a picture of residuals from a remote running Fluent session. You can use it to create reduced order models or sophisticated controllers in MATLAB for components designed in ANSYS Fluent. Let’s begin: Continue reading →

From Supercomputers to Handhelds

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE13). There I listened to a number of presentations given by mathematicians and engineers, who talked about running software programs on some of the biggest supercomputers in the world. When ANSYS was first founded in 1970, finite element analysis (FEA) simulations were typically performed on large “mainframes” that filled entire rooms — these were the supercomputers of that era.

More recently, the distributed solver in the ANSYS Mechanical product family was developed to allow engineers to run FEA simulations on large clusters, which is the hardware of choice for today’s supercomputers. In fact, in 2008 several mechanical simulations were performed on one of the TOP100 supercomputers in the world using the distributed ANSYS capability with calculations reaching over 1 Teraflop (over 1 trillion calculations per second). However, the point I want to raise today is that while ANSYS Mechanical software supports such speed and complexity required for the most numerically challenging and hardware-resource-intensive simulations, the power of a supercomputer is now available in the palm of your hand. Continue reading →

ANSYS Adds Installation Tutorials

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Those of us who grew up in the Internet era have come to know, love and (more than slightly) rely on YouTube for a variety of things. For me, one of the more useful things (One can spend many nonproductive hours that on YouTube … ) is finding videos that offer tutorials about how to do things such as DIY, cooking something special or fixing your bike. Whatever you want to do, it is very likely that a video somewhere on YouTube shows someone doing it.

One of the things our customers often ask us for is help walking through the installation process or explaining how to install the license file. They want reassurance that they are taking the right steps to get it right first time. Continue reading →

Setting Up a Simple Flow Simulation

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of conversing with Desktop Engineering magazine’s senior editor Kenneth Wong for a podcast recording. He had a simple challenge for me: For a structural engineer who is just beginning to work with fluid dynamics, outline the  points important to CFD flow simulation. Additionally, he asked me to explain how to avoid pitfalls when setting up the simulation and what to look for when analyzing the results.

My first thought was that, well, there are great classes, training and free YouTube videos available. Give me a couple of hours and I can turn a structural-expert-but-CFD-newbie into a CFD user. Kenneth understood all this, but his biggest challenge was yet to come. He asked me quite seriously, “And can you get an engineer on the right track in a couple of minutes?”

*** Mission Impossible soundtrack playing inside my head ****  Sure! Let’s do it!

Continue reading →

ANSYS ICEM CFD Interactive

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image of ICEM CFD batch controls in ANSYS Meshing

ICEM CFD interactive/batch controls can be found in the advanced options of several different methods in ANSYS Meshing.

ANSYS Meshing is the general purpose meshing tool found in the ANSYS Workbench environment. It includes a lot of powerful ICEM and TGrid meshing technology, but exposed in a simplified and automated way. For instance, MultiZone in ANSYS Meshing is based on ICEM CFD hexa technology, but without the learning curve associated with blocking, edge distributions, etc.

However, there are some occasions when advanced users want to take more direct and interactive control over their meshing. ANSYS Meshing allows advanced users to “pop the hood” on some mesh methods with the “ICEM CFD Interactive” options (TGrid interactive is also available as a Beta option). ICEM CFD interactive allows users to launch ICEM CFD with all its controls. You can do full hexa blocking, tetra/prism, shell meshing, diagnostics, automatic or interactive mesh editing, etc. You can start from just the geometry, transferred to ICEM CFD with meshing parameters, or you can actually start with the mesh and adjust it from there. For instance, you could generate an PI tetra mesh in ANSYS Meshing using “Interactive” with “Post Operation” and then use the extended ICEM CFD tools to replace the mesh with a smooth delaunay fill or 12 Tetra to 1 Hexa conversion, smooth, and then return to ANSYS Meshing. Continue reading →

ANSYS Webinar and Events This Week – Aug 13

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image of Learning text on a keyboardThis week we have Part 1 of a 3-Part ANSYS Webinar series dissecting the topic of multiphase flow modeling. To get a little precursor you might want to read our recent post entitled Multiphase Flow: Pentium to Dual Quad Core.

Ask-The-Expert: Part 1 – Introduction to Multiphase Models in ANSYS CFD

Wednesday, August 15, 2012
4:00 pm EDT, 8:00 pm GMT (REGISTER HERE)

Multiphase flow modeling tools have truly become a wide-spread and mature technology to gain insights into the flow characteristics of a broad range of multiphase flows. A survey of trade journal articles and scholarly publications attests to the increasing impact of multiphase flow modeling in solving everyday design and engineering challenges. Continue reading →