Thread: Running parallel jobs under Windows

Hi all,

Here I'm trying to set up a cluster to be able to run jobs in parallel mode. I do expect the results to come up in a single network share so it's esaily accessible. Is this an achievable goal?

Specifically this is principally for ANSYS.

I'd be happy if someone could point me out where to start..

The cluster contains only 2 hosts which are running fine. Thanks!

Does the ANSYS manual mention anything about running parallel ANSYS jobs via LSF? It should be in there. If not , you should check with the ANSYS folks as they are the ones who did the integration with LSF if I am not wrong.

Update: I just found a section for ANSYS in the Using LSF HPC documentation. You might want to refer to that and see if that helps.

Hi

You need to setup your windows cluster with a shared drive (usually the head node or a separate CIFS share). Then make sure you connect to the drive from your two compute nodes.

For your applications (ANSYS or otherwise), you need to make sure they do not cobbler each other when they write data to the share drive or directory.

What you want to achieve is 100% doable and is what all (most) clusters do daily.

Hi,

I did a mistake in fact.. There probably will never have parallel jobs but the share part is still true. So forget about the parallel jobs.

What happens here is that the bsub commad executes a batch file that runs the ANSYS ls-dyna command lines. The batch file works great under windows and yes that's what I thought first : Share a drive and map that drive using the same letter. The problem is : When submitting the job through LSF, I get an error as if the letter drive was unrecognize in the error file. I did talk to someone at Platform who suggested me to use the UNC name for the share, but it does not work either. (I can't provide the output, I deleted it and the server is currently fully loaded)

That's why I'm asking for any advice, or hint.

And yes I know clusters are for this particular purpose

To answer you gthomas :
Referring to the doc : The ANSYS GUI for LSF is not supported under Windows 64bits (Which is totally ...) ANSYS Inc. gave me that answer. As for submitting the jobs via command line we have no problems by now and it's how we work.

Thanks!

Hi

I assume you have a LSF support contract, suggest you continue to work with Platform support.. they will probably want your batch file and also the error output... I suspect it is probably just typo in the UNC or mapped drive... you know the usual '/' '\' and need '//' to escape characters...

cheers!