CONVERGE Horizon
Product Summary#
A brief summary of CONVERGE Horizon products and features is included below.
Organizations and Teams#
An organization is the highest-level grouping of CONVERGE Horizon users. The owner of an organization is responsible for inviting and managing organization members and for creating the teams to which members belong. Billing occurs at the organization level.
A team is a group of users who collaborate on one or more projects. All cloud resources are owned at the team level. You must be a member of a team to create and view projects, file systems, spaces, jobs, and workstations for that team. You cannot upload files, run jobs, or launch workstations without belonging to at least one team.
Projects#
Projects are a way of subdividing work within a team for tracking purposes. When users create a job or a workstation, they must select a project to associate with it.
Any team member can create a project, which then becomes available to all team members. Every team needs at least one project.
Storage#
There are two options for cloud storage on CONVERGE Horizon: file systems and spaces. We recommend file systems for most users because they enable faster job turnaround and support a wider range of workflows.
Storage is intentionally designed to be shared among team members. If a user needs a private file system or space, the organization owner must create a separate team for that user. Refer to Team Roles and Permissions for more information about storage permissions.
File Systems#
With CONVERGE Horizon file systems, teams can store and manage their data in a shared, persistent file system in the cloud. The file system is hosted on a virtual machine (VM) that users access securely from a web-based file manager or from a terminal. Users can log in to the VM from a local machine running any operating system; the VM itself runs Enterprise Linux 9.
File systems offer the following advantages over spaces:
Jobs running on file systems take less time to start and finish. This is because file systems are mounted to job clusters directly, which eliminates the need to copy input files to the cluster at the start of the simulation and move output files off the cluster at the end of the simulation. Additionally, each version of CONVERGE only has to be installed once on the file system, instead of being installed on the job cluster for every job.
File systems provide a more robust, full-featured file manager.
File systems can be mounted to cloud workstations and local machines for seamless data access, and they support scripting workflows through a login node.
While file systems and spaces have the same per-TB storage costs, file systems incur an additional monthly hardware fee for the VM (pricing details are available at convergecfd.com). For a large team with a high volume of jobs, file systems are more cost-efficient than spaces because the hardware fee is offset by the overall cost savings from faster job turnaround.
Spaces#
Attention
Spaces will be deprecated on September 1, 2026. After this date, you will no longer be able to create new spaces (existing spaces will continue to function normally). We recommending using file systems for cloud storage instead.
A space is a logical container for storing data within a given data center. Each organization can have up to 25 spaces across all of its teams. Spaces are available only in Oracle Cloud data centers.
Unlike file systems, spaces are based on an object storage architecture. They cannot be mounted to job clusters or other machines and they cannot be accessed through a login node. When you store simulation data in a space, CONVERGE Horizon must transfer the data between the space and the job cluster’s scratch storage at the beginning and end of the simulation, which can be time-consuming for large datasets.
Jobs#
A job is a collection of tasks to be executed on compute nodes, along with the specification of resources required to run those tasks. To put it more simply, jobs are how you run simulations on CONVERGE Horizon.
When you create a job, you configure options that control how tasks will be executed, such as the hardware specifications for the job cluster and the version of CONVERGE you want to run. Upon submission of the job, CONVERGE Horizon manages the process by which resources are requested from the pool of nodes available from the cloud provider. When nodes are secured, the job cluster is provisioned with Enterprise Linux 9 and all required software components. The runtime environment is configured to use HPC-X MPI (for CONVERGE 5 and earlier versions) or Intel MPI (for CONVERGE 6). If you are running the job from a space, the input files are copied from the space to the job cluster.
Every job runs on its own cluster. When the simulation is done, CONVERGE Horizon copies the output files back to the space (if applicable), destroys the cluster, and releases the nodes.
Batches#
Batches provide a way to run and manage multiple jobs together. This can be useful if you are running many related jobs for a design of experiments (DoE) or a parameter sweep, or if you use self-hosted licensing and you can only run one job at a time. Specifically, batches allow you to:
Submit multiple jobs at the same time.
Specify whether the jobs in a batch will run concurrently (at the same time) or consecutively (one at a time).
Specify whether all jobs in a batch should be stopped if one job fails.
Monitor the progress and cost of jobs in a batch.
Stop all jobs in a batch simultaneously.
All jobs in a batch must use a file system for storage. Spaces are not supported for batches.
Workstations#
A workstation is a virtual desktop that runs on the cloud. You can log in to a workstation to run pre- and post-processing applications, including CONVERGE Studio, Tecplot for CONVERGE, and ParaView, on CONVERGE Horizon.
Workstations are intended for graphics-intensive applications. They are not general-purpose compute nodes. You cannot run a simulation directly on a workstation, but you can attach a job to a workstation to enable real-time post-processing. You can also run the CONVERGE check_inputs utility as part of your pre-processing workflow. All workstations on CONVERGE Horizon run Enterprise Linux 9.