Maximum Number of Cores in Parallel on FLUENT 2020R2
 

I am not an expert on HPC and don't know much about parallel computing on FLUENT. I am using FLUENT 2020R2 in my institute so I assume that it is an academic license. I want to ask about the maximum number of cores that I can use on my PC when I want to run FLUENT in parallel. Currently, I have a system with 32 cores. So, do I need to have the HPC license separately to use all the cores? Apart from the front screen which comes when we start FLUENT and select the number of cores and parallel method, do I need to do anything else? How to check the number of cores allowed in the HPC license or on a work station without the HPC license?

Any guidance is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hopefully you do not have an academic license because it's basically useless. You hopefully have regular licenses and hpc licenses.

The easiest thing you can do, is just try it. Launch Fluent with 32 cores and see what happens. If you have no parallel licenses, you should still be able to run in parallel with 4 cores as long as you have a single seat license. Honestly you should have done this before coming here. Because you would've discovered that it worked and answered your own question or you would've been able to tell us the error message.

To figure out your license configuration, you need to run the license utility. In some cases, IT may have firewalled you out and the utility won't return anything meaningful. Then you need to ask around to real people who manage these resources.

There are several types parallel licenses utilized by Ansys. The HPC license you need one per core. The HPC Pack scales with powers of 2. The workgroup is basically a no-holds-barred license. Most groups will have a bunch of HPC licenses. But it gets more complicated, because they could be Ansys licenses or just Fluent licenses. They function the same but their scope and names that they print out when you run the utility look different.

Thanks a lot for your elaborate answer. I will try to run FLUENT on all my cores. My institute also has a HPC cluster with Ansys installed on it. But I don't know how many cores I can use on that one with FLUENT. I will try to ask people who manage this.