Lumerical solve, accelerator and Ansys HPC license consumption

Ansys Lumerical products come with a GUI and a solve license. See Lumerical product components and licensing and list of licensed features by product for more information.

The solver component allows running simulations on your machines. This article explains how many 'solve' licenses are required for various simulations, license types, and resource configurations. 'Solve' licenses are job and core/thread counted.

License types by products

Enterprise solve and HPC licenses

One enterprise solve license allows running a simulation job using up to 4 cores. They are compatible with Ansys HPC licenses and utilizes them when running with more cores.

Business (standard) solve licenses

A single solve license allows you to run one simulation up to 32 cores. To run a job with more than 32 cores an additional solve license is required for each increment of 32 cores used to run the simulation. The core/thread counting is unique for each job and cannot be shared. Support for "standard license" sharing has been added starting with the 2022 R1.1 release.

Academic (standard) solve licenses

Behaves the same as the Business products. One solve license allows you to run one simulation up to 32 cores. To run a job with more than 32 cores an additional solve license is required for each increment of 32 cores used to run the simulation. Academic products come with 4 solve licenses per product (1 GUI + 4 solve licenses). Support for "standard license" sharing has been added starting with the 2022 R1.1 release.

License sharing

Enterprise parametric sweep license sharing

The Enterprise license allows for concurrent sweeps to share a single 'solve' license in combination with Ansys HPC licenses.
You can use the Ansys Parametric Licensing Calculator tool to determine how many licenses you require to run your parameter sweep according to your resource configuration.

License consumption examples

Running a single (1) simulation job on a local machine using 32 cores. This will require:

1 enterprise solve license plus 28 Ansys HPC Workgroup increments 
or 
1 enterprise solve license plus 2 HPC Pack increments

Distributing a simulation across 4 machines with 32 cores (4 * 32 = 128 cores). This will require:

1 enterprise solve license plus 124 HPC Workgroup increments 
or 
1 enterprise solve license plus 3 HPC Pack increments.

Running a parameter sweep on the local computer (localhost) using 6 processes per simulation and 4 sweeps to run concurrently for a total of 24 cores used to run the job. The resource configuration for the local machine will be set to 6 processes and capacity=4. This will require:
```
1 enterprise solve license plus 40 Ansys HPC Workgroup increments 
or 
1 enterprise solve license plus 5 Ansys HPC Pack increments
```

Standard (Business and Academic) license sharing

Standard product license (Business and Academic) now has the ability to share solve license when running Photonic Multiphysics simulations with Microsoft MPI on the local machine (localhost).
This allows running parameter sweeps concurrently up to a total of 32 processes/cores on the 'localhost' utilizing only 1 solve license.
The resource configuration will indicate if the resource you are using to run the simulation supports standard license sharing.
Running multiple simulations at the same time on the 'localhost' using only 1 solve license can also be done via the command line.

License Consumption Examples

Running a single (1) simulation job on a local machine using 32 cores. This will checkout:
```
1 solve license
```
Distributing a simulation across 4 machines with 32 cores each (4 * 32 = 128 cores). This will require:
```
4 FDTD/varFDTD solve licenses
```
Distributing a simulation across 4 machines with 8 cores each (4 * 8 = 32 cores). This will require:
```
1 FDTD/varFDTD solve license
```
Running a parameter sweep on the local machine using 6 processes per simulation and 4 simulations running concurrently on the 'localhost' with a total of 24 cores running the job.
The resource configuration for the local machine will be set to processes=6 and capacity=4. From the resource configuration, it will indicate if license sharing is enabled (true) or not (false). With "standard license" sharing this will only checkout:
```
1 solve license to run the job with 4 concurrent sweeps using 6 cores per sweep
(6 processes x 1 thread x 4 capacity = 24 cores)
```

Standard license sharing for FDTD simulations on the command prompt

Standard license sharing via the command prompt is supported starting with 2022 R1.4 for FDTD simulations only.
There is no MPI support for this method. See standard license sharing above for MPI support using the CAD.
The simulations are run using the FDTD engine executable.
Multiple simulations can run on the localhost up to a total of 32 cores for all simulations and will be utilizing only 1 FDTD solve license.
Running the simulation from the command line is used to avoid checking out a GUI license if you only need to run simulations.

Running concurrent simulations with Standard license sharing

Open a Windows command prompt or terminal in Linux.
Change the directory to the location of your FDTD simulation files.
Run the simulations using the FDTD engine executable.

Example

Windows:

"C:\Program Files\Lumerical\[[verpath]]\bin\fdtd-engine.exe" -t 4 simulationfile1.fsp simfile2.fsp simfile3.fsp simulationfile4.fsp

Linux:

/opt/lumerical/[[verpath]]/bin/fdtd-engine-mpich2nem -t 4 sweepfile1.fsp sweepfile2.fsp sweepfile3.fsp sweepfile4.fsp

The example above is for a local computer that has 24 cores. Running 4 simulations at the same time (concurrent) using 4 threads/cores for each simulation file. All 4 simulations running concurrently will only utilize 1 FDTD solve license.