High-Performance Computing  |  Parallel processing licences  |  Lease or paid-up

Every Ansys solver licence includes four cores. Your hardware has far more. Ansys HPC Packs unlock the rest — scaling a single simulation from 4 cores to over 2,000, across CPUs and GPUs alike.

How do Ansys HPC Packs work?

Each pack multiplies your parallel capacity rather than adding to it. One pack unlocks 8 cores, two unlock 32, three unlock 128 — quadrupling at every step, following 4 + [8 × 4^(h−1)]. The four solver cores come free with every licence.

Anything beyond your entitlement sits idle. Two packs on a 48-core machine will solve on 36 cores and waste the other 12.

Because the scaling is exponential, where you deploy packs matters more than how many you own. The same four packs, four ways:

• One pack on each of four machines — 48 cores in total
• Two packs on each of two machines — 72 cores in total
• Three packs on one machine, one on another — 144 cores in total
• All four consolidated on one machine — 516 cores on a single solve

Identical licence spend, ten times the single-job capacity. Consolidate onto a queued node when a few large models dominate; split across machines when several engineers need to solve at once.

Two rules shape how you deploy them. An individual pack cannot be split between users or between analyses, and aside from the four built-in cores, packs cannot be mixed with other HPC licence types in the same solve. Packs can, however, be used to run concurrent parametric variations — supported through Workbench design points, Ansys Electronics Desktop and CFX operating maps.

Ansys HPC for GPUs

HPC Packs license GPU compute on the same entitlement. Ansys counts streaming multiprocessors (SMs) — the compute blocks inside a GPU — in place of CPU cores, or compute units (CUs) on AMD hardware. A CFD Enterprise licence includes 40 SMs before any pack is needed.

The critical difference is that SMs are fixed in silicon. You can leave CPU cores idle; you cannot switch off SMs, and a single Fluent case occupies the whole card. A GPU that crosses a bracket boundary forces the next pack tier whether or not you need the headroom — which makes card selection a licensing decision as much as a hardware one.

The comparisons that matter are between rows, not within them. A single RTX 5000 Ada (100 SMs) and a single RTX 6000 Ada (142 SMs) both sit in the three-pack bracket, so the faster card costs nothing extra to license. At four cards the position reverses: 4× RTX 5000 Ada totals 400 SMs and stays on four packs, while 4× RTX 6000 Ada reaches 568 SMs and tips into five. If the model needs four boards, the slower card can be the better buy once the licence is counted.

The same logic favours the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell at two cards — 376 SMs and 192GB on four packs, the same licence count as a single board. Where FP64 double precision is required, the H200 NVL carries the most memory and bandwidth but is server-only, while the A800 40GB Active fits a workstation with display output at lower throughput.

Under HPC licensing, GPU acceleration is available in Ansys Fluent, Ansys Mechanical, Ansys HFSS transient and Ansys Polyflow. Other applications remain CPU-only. Ansys Rocky is the exception to the whole model — it uses its own HPC Task and Feature licences, with 112 SMs already included in the base product.

Compatible Ansys Products

HPC Packs draw from one shared pool across the Ansys solver portfolio. Every application below runs on four included cores and scales from there on packs:

Licensed separately. These scale in parallel but do not draw on HPC Packs:

• Ansys LS-DYNA — Ansys LS-DYNA HPC licences (dysmp) — sold as HPC-8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 128 / 256. Standard HPC Pack licences cannot be used.
• Ansys Rocky — Ansys Rocky HPC Tasks and Features. The base licence already covers 112 GPU SMs; 1 task adds 14 SMs.
• Ansys EnSight — Node-based EnSight HPC and EnSight HPC+ licences.

Not applicable. Ansys Discovery, Ansys SpaceClaim, Ansys Zemax OpticStudio, Ansys Granta MI, Ansys SCADE Suite, Ansys medini analyze, Ansys Sound and similar desktop, design and data products do not consume HPC Packs, though several use GPU acceleration natively at no licence cost.

Other ways to license Ansys HPC

• Ansys HPC Workgroup — a flat pool of cores, from 16 up to 32,768, divisible across machines and jobs however you choose. More flexible for shared clusters, less peak scale per solve.
• Ansys CFD HPC Ultimate — introduced in 2025 R1, a task-based licence that removes core limits entirely for CFD Enterprise solvers. One fixed cost, any number of cores or GPU SMs per job.

Not sure how many packs your models need? Send CADIT a representative model and your hardware specification, and we will size the entitlement and show you the break-even points before you buy.

Licensing behaviour per the Ansys 2025 R1 Licensing Guide and Ansys HPC documentation. GPU SM counts are manufacturer specifications. Entitlements change between releases — confirm current scope with CADIT before purchase.