Learning Forum

[CalebOU]

My computer has 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs, so 16 cores, but when I am in Ansys Mechanical and go to "Solve Process Settings" under Tools, select Advanced, and specify to use anything above 8 cores, I receive an error message saying "The requested number of distributed-memory processes (> exceeds the number of physical processors that are available ( on the machine. The use of virtual processors is not recommended. It is required that you use a maximum of 8 distributed-memory processes on this machine."

 

How can I get Ansys to recognize my second CPU and other 8 cores available?

[Rob]

Which software/licence are you using as the error may be due to limits in that rather than the hardware.

[Aniket]

Do you have hyperthreading turned off? If that is the case, the number of threads will be the same as the number of cores. (which is recommended).

Looking at the spec sheet, if you have 2 physical Xeon E5-2670 CPUs, you should have 16 cores (with hyperthreading turned off), so if you can't use more than 8 core it might be due to the fact that you might not have enough HPC licenses to run the said run.

[peteroznewman]

I have two physical CPUs, and without opening the box, Windows 7 shows me that when I get Properties on My Computer.

Can you confirm that you really do have two physical CPUs and not just one 8-core CPU with 2 threads per core.  That will show up in Task Manager as 16 cores if Hyperthreading is On, but as Aniket says, turn that off if your main work on the computer is ANSYS models.

[CalebOU]

I have license Ansys Student Teaching Introductory, it was the free student download I obtained through my school.

[CalebOU]

I do have hyperthreading turned off, in the solve.output file it confirmed one thread per core. I also was unable to use more than 32000 elements in my mesh because of my type of license, so it sounds like the student license is somewhat restrictive.

[CalebOU]

I also confirmed in BIOS that hyperthreading is off

[CalebOU]

Peteroznewman, please see above. Thank you all for your responses as well

[Rob]

I think you're out of parallel licences: from memory you get 4 with the solver and possibly 4 with the Student/Teaching version. 

The Student/Teaching version is identical in capabilities to the Reseach and Commercial versions except you're limited in how many cells you can solve.

[peteroznewman]

According to pgl, the Student License is limited to 16 cores.

 

[Rob]

OK thanks, that's changed from last time I looked, sure it was 4 or 8.