Below are some of the most frequently asked questions about PHOENICS-OTC.
Limited vCPU quotas are set by Microsoft Azure for new accounts in order to avoid accidental large bills.
One can increase the vCPU quota easily by following these steps. It is however recommended to perform this ahead of time, as it can take time to get approved.
In terms of pure performance, currently the most powerful VM is a HB120.
Using a HB120 will get your simulations running much faster than on any workstation.
A simulation with 24 million cells takes approximately 15 times less than on a typical Xeon workstation.
A new account on Azure is unlikely to have sufficient vCPU quota for the HB120, so be sure to request an increase early on.
Yes.
The VM will only stop running once you tell it to Stop/De-allocate, so you can turn off your local machine and go enjoy the weekend while the VM does the heavy lifting!
Be sure to be enable to the Timer utility before going, this will ensure the VM gets de-allocated when the runs are finished.
Creating a VM also creates a virtual hard drive and this incurs a daily cost - irrespective of being used or not.
To reduce the storage costs you should select the "Standard hard drive" option when creating the VM. If you missed this step, when the VM is stopped you can go to the VM properties page on the Azure portal and change the disk type there.
Creating a VM will also create additional resources such as network interfaces, public IP, etc. These do not incur additional costs.
To completely delete all the resources associated with a VM, go to All Resources on the Azure portal, filter by VM name and delete individual objects.
It would be easiest and cost effective for the user to compress and download the relevant results and q1 files to a local machine or storage facility.
Azure does provides long term archive storage but at cost and requires some configuration to work.
Storing PHOENICS results on the default hard drive of the VM (128GB, Standard HDD LRS) costs £0.16/day in the UK region - for more information.
Yes.
We will provide user support to get you up and running on the cloud. This will include support from creating your Azure account all the way to running your first simulation on the cloud.
Be advised that this does not include support for technical questions specific any simulation cases. For technical support please contact phoenics@cham.co.uk.