Checking your system for Ansys Compatibility
A great tool in Windows to use is the System Information App.
Click on the Start Menu and type “sys” or “msinfo” and the Application should come up
CPU Cores must be Physical and Identical
The first thing to check is the CPU configuration on the machine. If you are using recommended Ansys Hardware you will have CPU cores that work with various implementations of MPI (Intel, Microsoft, etc.) and these types of CPUs such as the Intel Xeon processor line work well for parallel solving. Ansys publishes its hardware compatibility and other key information for each release here: Platform Support and Recommendations | Ansys
In many of the new CPUs particularly consumer models with gaming intended they are designed with both Efficient and Performance cores, such as the i7-12800H shown below with 14 cores and 20 logical processors.
You will want to check the specifications of your CPU by looking for the terms “efficient cores” and/or “performance cores.” For example, Intel Core i712800H Processor 24M Cache up to 4.80 GHz Product Specifications.
Ansys can only utilize Performance cores for solving using MPI. This is because MPI requires identical hardware CPUs for parallel solving. The Efficient cores are different than the performance cores and thus will not work with Ansys’s use of MPI. There may be third-party applications that can use the efficient cores but it is not a supported configuration for Ansys solving.
- Hyperthreading
- Performance and Efficient Cores
Hyperthreading must be turned off
If the Processor Item in the above System Information Summary Page lists a larger number of Logical Processors than the number of Cores, this is an indication that Hyperthreading is enabled on your machine.
For complete Ansys solving compatibility you will need to go into the BIOS and disable Hyperthreading – your IT can help with that. Again, this is a requirement from Ansys’s use of MPI to distribute matrices to CPU cores for solving.
For the above machine, it has 6 physical Performance cores and therefore in Ansys, you can solve with those 6 cores only and will need 1 HPC Pack license or AECs if using Elastic Licensing.
Your Graphics Card must be compatible with Ansys
Again, you can check what GPUs Ansys has tested for both solving and for compatibility with Ansys here: Platform Support and Recommendations | Ansys
Within the System Information Page, select Components > Display
On many systems, there is often a Display Adapter that is standard and may be integrated with the main board of the computer system. Ansys is not compatible with most if not all of these integrated cards. Most commonly it will be a UHD graphics or Intel Xe Graphics.
Go into Device Manager and disable the extra Intel Iris Xe Graphics or UHD card so you are using only the Nvidia RTX or other compatible card.
Check for adequate Disk Space and Do Not use One Drive with Open Ansys Project Files
Make sure that Microsoft One Drive or other backup file systems are not backing up and synching your Ansys model files, they can become corrupted when they try synching files to a cloud location.
You can see a quick summary of all your drives using the Storage > Drives menu item.
Make sure that your OS drive as well as your drive with your Ansys models have reasonable space relative your model size and result files. Ansys Solve files such as *.rst files in Mechanical can quickly take up much space. It is important to manage those files especially if multiple runs fail as they will leave result files behind for each CPU core used.
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