Power Outage
 

What are most people doing to ensure a loss of power at the office does not result in a computer/server power loss in the middle of a long solver run?

Specifically, what kind of battery backup will last overnight and satisfy the power required for a CFX server machine?

AND/OR is there some routine I can implement that will either:
1. automatically go through a stop-and-save-and-close procedure if my small battery backup kicks on and I am not at the office to manually stop and save the run? or
2. notify me of the power outage event so that I can get to the machine or remotely access the machine and stop, save, and close the run myself before my little battery backup fails.

(I am running Ansys 13 workbench)

a reasonably sized UPS will give you around 30 minutes of power (depending on hardware configuration). the recent ones have the ability to automatically shout down the pc attached after X minutes of no power and to notify to you the event via mail and/or sms.

just to give you a pointer in your ups, APC is a reliable brand. i would not buy ridicously cheap Ups: the risk is that your battery will not last as stated by the manufacture.

good luck.

Thank you for the information. I will look into the auto-notification more. Any experiential info on this type of notification hardware/software would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

Even if the computer is shut down properly, though, the solver will still be mid-run. Is there a way to get something in place that could stop the solver, save the workbench project, and THEN do a computer shut-down?

my experience in the subject is fairly limited, but for mine, it was sufficient to link it, install the software, configure the mail address and the autoshutdown on the server. pretty much straightforward.

not that i know of. what i tend to do is autosave frequently (i'd say around 4 h of wallclock) so in case the cluster goes down (or, more often, i exceed the queue max time) i don't loose too much.