How to estimate the number of HWUs to be drawn for a FEKO simulation submitted to an HPC?

Jaryd Baker
Jaryd Baker New Altair Community Member
edited September 2021 in Community Q&A

Altair provides the following table to calculate the cost of running a simulation on an HPC system (using the SolverHPC feature):

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However, this requires the number of cores in use to be known at the time that the simulation is run. We have more than one HPC queue which all draw from the same license pool. This makes it impossible to track the number of cores that are in use (i.e. one HPC queue cannot query the usage on another). In addition, it is impossible to calculate the number of cores in use from HWUs that have been drawn as the order in which simulations are run and completed matters and can result in HWU costs different to those listed above. For example:

  1. First a simulation with 4 cores is started which draws 30 HWUs
  2. Next a different 4-core simulation is started which draws 1.6 HWUs per core, for a total of 6.4 HWUs
  3. Next, simulation 1 terminates which releases 30 HWUs
  4. Now 6.4 HWUs are in use for only 4 cores which is not what is listed in the above table (for example, from 6.4 one cannot determine if 4, 8, or 16 cores were drawn at the time that job was submitted)

Using the Altair license manager, how can one determine the number of cores in use when many HPC queues draw from the same license pool? This is necessary for implementing a queue manager which should queue a simulation in case not enough HWUs are available at the time that the simulation is submitted to the HPC.

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