Please refer to the ANSYS 18.1 Help > Mechanical Applications > Mechanical User’s Guide > Troubleshooting > Problem Situations > An Error Occurred While Starting the Solver Module, as below: Solving and UNC Paths If a Workbench database resides on a UNC path (for example, \computer_nameShare) for which you have write permissions, the ANSYS input file will be written successfully but will fail to start the solver executable. To solve, map a drive to the location and then reopen the project. If you did not have write permissions, Workbench will instead write the ANSYS input file to your temp directory (%tmp%) and perform a solution from that directory. Please try to map a network drive for the UNC path, close Workbench, reopen it and reopen the project saved on network drive, rather than UNC path. Refer to the Release 18.1 MAPDL Performance Guide 5.3.3 I/O Configuration. Certain jobs perform more I/O than others. The sparse solver (including both the shared and distributed memory versions) running in the out-of-core memory mode along with the Block Lanczos eigensolver commonly perform the most amounts of I/O in the program. Also, Distributed ANSYS can perform higher numbers of I/O requests than the shared memory version of program because each Distributed ANSYS process writes its own set of files. For jobs that perform a large amount of I/O, having a slow file system can impact scalability because the elapsed time spent doing I/O does not decrease as more CPU cores are utilized. If this I/O time is a significant portion of the overall runtime, then the scalability is significantly impacted. A workaround is to set the ‘Scratch Solver Files Directory’ to a local path on local fast disk drive as below. The setting can be found in Mechanical > Tools > Options > Mechanical > Analysis Settings. Wherever your Workbench project is saved. The Mechanical solver working directory will be set to the Scratch Solver Files Directory to solve and avoid slow I/O bottleneck on a network drive.