ANSYS Rocky DEM

ANSYS Rocky DEM is a Discrete Element Method (DEM) particle simulation software solution, which enables the design of engineerig systems for the handling of granular materials. 

Further information about ANSYS Rocky DEM, licensing of the ANSYS software and related terms of software usage at LRZ, the ANSYS mailing list, access to the ANSYS software documentation and LRZ user support can be found on the main ANSYS documentation page.

Licensing

ANSYS Rocky DEM is part of the ANSYS Campus license owned and managed by LRZ. At LRZ High-Performance computing systems (CM4, SNG) the licenses for rocky DEM are provided free of charge.

Getting Started

Once you are logged into one of the LRZ cluster systems, you can check the availability (i.e. installation) of ANSYS Rocky DEM software by:

> module avail rocky_dem

Load the prefered ANSYS Rocky DEM version environment module, e.g.:

> module load rocky_dem/2025.R2

CoolMUC-4 : ANSYS Rocky DEM Job Submission on LRZ Linux Clusters running SLES15 using SLURM

In the following an example of a job submission batch script for ANSYS Rocky DEM solver on CoolMUC-4 (SLURM queues = serial, partition = serial_std) in the batch queuing system SLURM is provided.

Please use this large and powerful compute resource with a carefully specified number of CPU cores and a reasonably quantified amount of requested node memory per compute node of CM4. Don't waste powerful CM4 compute resources and please be fair to other CM4 cluster users.

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -o ./myjob.%j.%N.out
#SBATCH -D ./
#SBATCH -J rocky_dem_cm4_serial
#SBATCH --clusters=serial
#SBATCH --partition=serial_std
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=8
# --- Maximum number of CPU Cores in serial_std/_long are 8 cores ---
#SBATCH --mem=100G
# --- Realistic assumption for memory requirement of the task and proportonal to the used number of CPU cores ---
 #SBATCH --get-user-env
#SBATCH --mail-type=NONE
#SBATCH --mail-user=Max.Mustermann@lrz.de
#SBATCH --no-requeue
#SBATCH --export=NONE
#SBATCH --time=00:10:00
#-----------------------
module load slurm_setup

module avail rocky_dem
module load rocky_dem/2025.R2
module list 

# cat /proc/cpuinfo
echo ========================================== ANSYS Rocky DEM Start ==============================================
# For later check of the correctness of the supplied ANSYS Rocky DEM command it is echoed to stdout,
# so that it can be reviewed afterwards in the job file:
echo Rocky --simulate TestCase_2025R2.rocky --ncpus=$SLURM_NTASKS --resume=0 --headless
Rocky --simulate TestCase_2025R2.rocky --ncpus=$SLURM_NTASKS --resume=0 --headless >> Rocky_TestCase_2025R2.out
# Please do not forget to insert here your own set of Rocky DEM files with its correct name!
echo ========================================== ANSYS Rocky DEM Stop ===============================================

Assumed that the above SLURM script has been saved under the filename "rocky_dem_cm4_serial.sh", the SLURM batch job has to be submitted by issuing the following command on one of the Linux Cluster login nodes:

sbatch rocky_dem_cm4_serial.sh

General Concluding Remarks

On the LRZ cluster systems at the moment only the usage of Rocky DEM on a single node with shared memory is supported and known to work propperly with ANSYS Rocky DEM.

ANSYS Rocky DEM solver has so far only be tested on CoolMUC-4 (serial / cm4_inter / cm4_tiny) Linux Cluster partitions.
If you have the need to run ANSYS Rocky DEM solver on any other LRZ HPC system, please file a corresponding LRZ Service Request.