Mechanical / MAPDL

Guidance last updated: 19 October 2026

Ansys Mechanical is a finite element analysis (FEA) tool that enables you to analyse complex product architectures and solve difficult mechanical problems. It can simulate the behaviour of components and subsystems, and be customised to test design variations. It interfaces with Ansys pre- and post-processing tools and supports shared-memory processing on one node and MPI-based processing across nodes.

Caution

ANSYS users can now use a maximum of 400 concurrent cores, across all devices on campus, including personal machines and HPC clusters, and regardless of the number of ANSYS applications they have open. Please see ANSYS license restrictions for more detail.

Warning

ANSYS/2026R1 MAPDL jobs need a production licence-server update, which is not currently planned. Until then, use ANSYS/2023R2 in the shared-memory example. The distributed-memory route was tested with an updated test licence server.

Usage

After connecting to Stanage (see Establishing a SSH connection), start an interactive session:

salloc

You can load a specific version with the following command:

module load ANSYS/2026R1
module load ANSYS/2023R2

Batch jobs

The following example batch submission scripts read your MAPDL input file, model.inp, from the submission directory. Adjust the example resources to suit your model.

Shared-memory example

Save this script as mech_job.sh. It requests two CPUs and 4000 MB on one node for one hour:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=2
#SBATCH --mem=4000
#SBATCH --job-name=ansys_mech-test
#SBATCH --output=output_ansys_mech_test
#SBATCH --time=01:00:00

module load ANSYS/2026R1
cd "$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR"
export KMP_AFFINITY=disabled

mapdl -smp -dir "$PWD" -b -np "$SLURM_NTASKS" -j solution \
  -i model.inp -o solution.out

Distributed-memory example

This example uses ANSYS/2023R2 and requests one MPI process on each of two nodes, with 4000 MB per node for one hour. Save it as mech_job.sh:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --mem=4000
#SBATCH --job-name=ansys_mech-test
#SBATCH --output=output_ansys_mech_test
#SBATCH --time=01:00:00

module load ANSYS/2023R2
cd "$SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR"
export KMP_AFFINITY=disabled

unset I_MPI_HYDRA_BOOTSTRAP_EXEC_EXTRA_ARGS
unset HYDRA_LAUNCHER_EXTRA_ARGS

machinelist=$(scontrol show hostnames "$SLURM_JOB_NODELIST" |
  awk '{printf "%s:1:", $0}' | sed 's/:$//')

mapdl -dis -mpi INTELMPI -machines "$machinelist" -b \
  -i model.inp -o solution.out

The two unset commands remove Slurm launcher arguments that MAPDL’s SSH-based MPI launcher cannot use.

Submit either script with:

sbatch mech_job.sh

Installation notes

ANSYS was installed using Easybuild, build details can be found in $EBROOTANSYS/easybuild with a given module loaded.

ANSYS Mechanical training and help resources

Important

Academic support requests should be directed to the IT Services’ Research and Innovation team or the ANSYS Learning Forum (ensure you register with your University email for priority support).

ANSYS provides numerous academic training and help resources including tutorials, video lectures and examples for structural and mechanical products. A short list of the resources ANSYS maintains is summarised below: