Ansys Lumerical Burst

Ansys Lumerical Burst is a new feature, available from 2025 R1.3 release, that integrates Ansys Cloud Burst Compute into the Ansys Lumerical FDTD™ software. You can seamlessly submit jobs on-demand to cloud equipped with the latest high-performance GPU/CPU hardware. The cloud resources are set up by Ansys and require no IT or HPC expertise to run large-scale simulations. Ansys Lumerical Burst supports CPU, GPU, and sweeps simulations, from the Ansys Lumerical FDTD user interface, on Windows and Linux.

Requirements and Onboarding

To use Ansys Cloud Burst Compute from Ansys Lumerical FDTD desktop application, your company must subscribe to an Ansys Cloud plan. Each subscription includes a pool of cloud compute credits and provides access to a limited number of users. On top of your subscription, you can also purchase additional cloud compute credits as needed. Your subscription is managed by administrator within your company using the Ansys Admin Portal. For information on how to use this portal, see the Ansys Admin Portal Guide on Ansys Help.

In addition to the Ansys Cloud plan and sufficient credits, you will also need a license to enable the Ansys Lumerical FDTD user interface (such as Ansys Lumerical FDTD license, Ansys Lumerical Enterprise or Ansys Lumerical Enterprise prep/post license).

For more information on the Ansys Cloud plan and Ansys Cloud Burst Compute, please contact us via the landing page for Ansys Cloud Burst Compute or contact your sales representative.

Lumerical Burst Example – My First GPU Simulation

This section demonstrates a simple example of submitting a GPU job using Ansys Lumerical Burst with default settings. For more advanced options, refer to the section below on Ansys Lumerical Burst Job Settings and Procedures.

To submit your first Ansys Lumerical Burst job, follow the procedure below:

1. Open your project file in Ansys Lumerical FDTD 2025 R1.3 or newer.
2. Navigate to the “FDTD” Tab, select “GPU”, and select “Burst” from the “Run Simulation” Group.
   
3. Click “Run”. If you are not logged into your Ansys account, you will be prompted to do so.
4. 4. The Job Submission panel opens. Ensure you have sufficient credits and click “Submit” near the bottom of this panel. By default, a queue is automatically selected based on memory estimation of the job. You can select your own queue by checking the “Advanced” box. More information can be found in the “Job Submission Panel” section below.
   
5. Job status and progress are displayed in the Job Manager window. Once it is complete, the completed simulation file containing the results and associated log files are automatically downloaded and loaded into the desktop Lumerical FDTD interface.

Your first simulation with Ansys Lumerical Burst is now complete.

Ansys Lumerical Burst Job Settings and Procedures

This section will outline the detailed options and procedures for job submissions in Ansys Lumerical FDTD.

Sign-In

A sign-in to your Ansys account is required to use Ansys Lumerical Burst. This can either be done through the Optics Launcher, through the top right of the GUI, or when you first open the job submission window.

After initiating the sign in through either process, press the “Sign in with Ansys” button, and follow the instructions on the opened webpage.

Submitting Simulations via the GUI

To submit a single simulation job, select “Burst” from the resource selection dropdown menu in the “Run Simulation” Group of the “FDTD” Tab for either CPU or GPU simulations. Pressing the “Run” button will open the Job Submission panel, which will be described in a subsequent section.

To submit a sweep job, got to the Optimization and Sweep window, select a sweep then click the “Burst” button. This button opens the Job Submission panel for the current sweep. You can also submit a sweep job with a right-click on the selected sweep, then selecting “Run Burst” from the context menu. Note that these buttons will be disabled if an unsupported solver (such as RCWA, or STACK) is used for the sweep.

Submitting Simulations via Script

Ansys Lumerical Burst jobs and settings can also be displayed and set using script commands.

To get the current job settings, you use the getresource script command, that will provide the current settings and available queues. For detailed information on the returned struct including its fields , refer to the getresource script command page.

#Returns a struct with current burst settings
burstSettings = getresource("burst"); 

#Returns all available burst accounts
burstAccounts = getresource("burst","accounts");

#Returns a list of GPU queues for the Ansys account example@example.com
gpuQueues = getresource("burst", "user@company.com", "GPU");
 
#Returns a list of CPU queues for the Ansys account example@example.com
cpuQueues = getresource("burst", "user@company.com", "CPU"); 

To set and submit jobs, the usual run and runsweep commands can be used. Prior to running these commands, you must be logged into your account. When submitting jobs using these commands, the Job Submission panel will not show up. When running these commands without the optional settings as an argument, the default account and the queue automatically selected by Lumerical FDTD will be used.

Examples for these commands are shown below. For more information, such as the exact fields of the options struct, see pages on the run and runsweep commands.

#Submit a single simulation burst job with default options using the GPU
run("FDTD", "GPU", "burst");

#Submit a single simulation burst job with the Ansys account user@company.com
burstSettings={"account": "user@company.com"};
run("FDTD", "GPU", "burst", burstSettings);

#Submit a sweep called “burst sweep” with default options using the GPU
runsweep("burst sweep", "GPU", "burst");

#Submit all sweeps with default settings on the GPU
runsweep("GPU","burst");

Job Submission Panel

The Job Submission panel displays various options for job submission to Ansys Cloud Burst Compute. An example screen for this panel is shown below, along with a table explaining each field.

Job Manager Status

The job manager opens after you submit a simulation, it contains useful job status information. Three important components for Ansys Lumerical Burst are labeled and explained below.

1 – Status

The status box displays the current status of the job, the indicators are as follows:

• Uploading: Uploading file to the Ansys Cloud Burst Compute server.
• Creating: Creating job in the cloud server.
• Queued: Queued for simulation in the cloud server.
• The following status indicates that the simulation is commencing:
  • Starting
  • Updating Modes
  • Meshing
  • Building Sources
  • Running
  • Saving
  • Wrapping Up
• Completed: Simulation complete and ready for download.
• Downloading: Downloading simulation from the Ansys Cloud Burst Compute server. This will only appear if “Download results after completion” is checked in the Job Submission panel.
• Downloaded: Simulation completed and results have been downloaded. This will only appear if “Download results after completion” is checked in the Job Submission panel.
• Cancelled: Simulation has been cancelled.

2 – Progress

This progress bar displays the progress for the current state of the simulation, such as uploading and downloading progress.

3 – Overall Progress

This progress bar displays the overall progress of all jobs.

Ansys Engineering Portal

The Ansys engineering portal can be used to view the history of job submissions, download their files, and monitor credit consumption. For guides on how to do these, see Section 5 of the Ansys Engineering Portal Guide (Ansys account required to view).

Available Features and Current Limitations

There are currently the following limitations for using Ansys Lumerical Burst:

1. It only supports simulations using the FDTD solver.
2. It supports single simulations and sweeps. Optimization jobs are currently not supported.
3. It supports single-node multi-GPU up to eight GPUs.

See Also

Introduction to High-Performance Computing with Lumerical, Ansys Cloud Burst Compute