Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

A quick blog for those starting Phase 2 and thinking of thesis titles.

A less known about resource available to all PET students is the Cranfield high performance computers. This resource is invaluable if you are wanting to conduct any process heavy computational fluid dynamics (or FEA) using software packages such as ANSYS. Having just used this for my thesis I can highly recommend it, as without it, trying to execute on your own machine is a none starter! In addition, the student downloads that are available from ANSYS have inbuilt limitations on the size of problem you can execute.

If you are thinking about using this resource then more information can be found by searching on the Cranfield intranet for ‘accessing HPC’. You will then need to apply for the Crescent service, which is a dedicated teaching resource to MSc students. Once you have been granted access you are free to use the server.

A basic outline of the steps involved is to develop the model on your own machine, upload to your Cranfield storage, open on ANSYS remote desktop connection, finalise all aspects of the model, save as a .case file and exit, open Cranfield server and follow instructions to load a submission file. Once loaded into the server, there is no requirement to leave your laptop on as it will execute remotely and upload results to your online storage. Download and analyse.

There are other software packages available but ANSYS contains elements of and most aspects of both the C and E&M courses. If anyone think they are going to use it I can share the execution files that I used. They seemed to work ok ….