Learning Forum

[Aric Meyer]

With the release on October 7, 2024 comes a new capability in HPS to specify a local scratch directory. By default, Mechanical APDL solves will use local scratch if available on the selected hardware. For other solvers the setting must be enabled. The steps are given below.

1. In the Ansys Access on Microsoft Azure web UI, HPS virtual desktop table row, click Connect  to launch the Ansys HPC Manager web app.
2. Sign in to Ansys HPC Manager.
3. In the navigation pane, select Resources.
4. In the compute resource list, select the autoscaling cluster.
5. Select the Properties tab.
6. Here you can choose either of these methods:
   1. Use local scratch for all applications by checking the Local Scratch box under the Backend section.
   2. Use local scratch only for specific applications. Scroll down to the Applications section, find the Application(s) you wish to enable local scratch for, and change the setting to True.
7. Once you have finished changing the settings, scroll to the top of the page and click Save.

All future HPS jobs will use these settings. Background info: Some solvers make use of temporary scratch space to store information that may not fit into RAM. If the disk I/O is slow it may reduce solve speed. Some Microsoft Azure instance types have locally attached dedicated SSDs including all the HPC instances (HB, HC, HX families). These disks are usually the best locations to use for scratch space. For more details about scratch drives on Access on Microsoft Azure see the documentation Local Storage for Temporary Solver Data (ansys.com)