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Seminar about parallel computation

Motor

Hi everyone,

I am checking the resources that Simlab provides for parallel computation and I can not find a lot about this topic. Could anyone address me to something useful to run several (parametric) simulations simultaneously?

If not, would it be possible to make a seminar about this topic, as I think that many of us Simlab users would appreciate some new solutions to get faster results?

Best regards

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Marc_21384

Hello,

If you have the script you can follow this video. After creating your DOE under settings you can define how many runs you want to simulate simultaneosly. Let me know if you have problems with this.

https://altair-2.wistia.com/medias/9ura1kyupm

Kind regards,

Marc

Motor

Hello,

Thank you for sharing the video. The problem with my simulation is that I can not create a DoE in the proper definition of the word, as I am calling several geometries as parasolid files from SolidWorks, hence I can not create any geometrical parameters in Simlab.

Do you have a workaround for this problem? Is it still possible to run several simulations simultaneously although no parameters can be set in Simlab?

Best regards

Marc_21384

If you create beforehand all the geometrical modifications and save them in one folder. You can create a python variable for the name. Let's say you call it Design1, Design2, Design3… Your script can parametrize the name when importing the CAD, thus using the DOE. What do you think?

Kind regards,

Marc

Motor

This is a good idea and I already tried it previously. The problem is that in my python file I will have a for loop that goes through all the geometries, hence it will still be sequential.

What I would like to do is to achieve a parallel computation of my problem, where several for loops are running simultaneously, similarly to parfoor in MATLAB.

Do you think that this is possible somehow?

Marc_21384

It is. Create the parameter within Simlab. This way it will read it for a DOE. Let me show you what I think:

Create the Parameter:

2. In your script, edit the import.

3. Test, as you can see it imports it correctly and this way you can use the DOE:

Let me know how it goes.

Motor

Thank you for your help. I already implemented your method in my Python script but what I do not really understand is the following:

Does Simlab compute everything already in parallel if I set a certain number of processors in Format and Execute Options → Number of processors and then start the python script on simlab? Or should I do something in the Python script in order to allow Simlab to really compute everything in parallel? Like in MATLAB where we have parfor that is needed to specify that all iterations need to be executed in the same time and not individually as in a regular for loop. Do I need to do something like this in the Python script too, or Simlab handels everything already just by getting a number of processors set?

Best regards

Marc_21384

For a single solution. Let's say your emag solution - Format and Execute options won't parallelize between multiple simulations. This is only for that specific one.

For that, I'm proposing the DOE. In the settings in your DOE solution you can define the amount of runs you want to simulate simultaneously.

It is important you verify the combination between the format and execute options, and the numbers of simultaneous runs don't exceed the numbers of cores. Ideally, don't use all of them either.

Does this answer your question?

Kind regards,

Marc

Motor

I understand the importing of several parasolid geometries but what is still unclear is how I could start all these simulations simultaneously. If I use the command simlab.execute(ExportandSolve); I only get one simulation to run, but not all the opened models. Could you help me with that?

Marc_21384

Please follow the video starting from the minute 8:20. It shows how to create the DOE, this is what you will use to run have multiple runs at the same time. You just need to define this in the settings, which is not shown in the video.

Motor

To be more clear I explain you what I am trying to do:

Python script calls n geometries (depending on the number of parallel processes I want to start)
I Import n geometries into Simlab through the function you showed in your previous answer.
I start the simulation through the execute function for all geometries.

But how do I assign the results in a correct way once the simulations are done? Lets assume we have 20 parallel simulations and one of them finishes before the others. How could I assign this to a matrix in Python so that it is done in a deterministic way?