Running simulations on a different computer

[Sylvain]

Say you have two computers: your "normal" workstation, Computer A, and a "powerful" workstation (e.g. with GPUs), Computer B, that is sitting in a different room.

How do you get simulations, which you are setting up on Computer A, to run on Computer B?

The process is relatively straightforward, provided the two computers can communicate using the network:

1. Sim4Life is running on Computer A

2. Ares is running on Computer B [see user manual, e.g. section 2.14.2.3 Ares as Standalone Server]

3. Use "Scan Network" in Sim4Life (Computer A) Task Manager to discover Ares (Computer [see section 2.14.1.3 Networking Tab]

4. Use "Run on Cloud" in the simulation tab of Sim4Life to run the simulation on Computer B

Note that you can also set up Ares so that it runs as a Windows service, in case you want it to start automatically when you reboot the machine.

As for running simulations on remote servers using Python, here is how it is done:

    servers = s4l_v1.simulation.GetAvailableServers()
    sim.RunSimulation(server_id=servers.get('MYSERVER', None))

In the first line, we get a dictionary with the names and IDs of the available servers.
In the second line we try to submit the simulation to MYSERVER. If we are not connected to MYSERVER, the simulation will run at None, which defaults to the local workstation (localhost).