Simcenter STAR-CCM+ How to avoid unexpected usage of PoD hours?
2023-01-11T08:15:53.000-0500
Simcenter STAR-CCM+
Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Virtual Reality
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Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Application Specific Solutions
Summary
A description is given to understand the PoD hours consumption, especially for the deposited hours, to avoid unexpected consumption
Details
The usage of Power on Demand (PoD) hours can be checked on the Support Center, under Account Center > Licenses > POD Licenses (link).
If you have a PoD license, you will be redirected to the Account Activity Real Time Statement page: here you can see the usage of your PoD hours.
Available hours are in green, used ones are in red and the deposited are in yellow. A deposit will exist only if the license is currently in use: if this is not the case, you should see no deposit as in this image:
If the license is in use (through at least one job), a deposit will appear in yellow:
The deposit will be a 24 hours deposit in any case. When the server is stopped, only the used hours will become red, and the unused are released as green.
If the job is still active after one day, 24 hours will be flagged as used and a new deposit of 24 hours is created; this is repeated each day at the same time if the server is not stopped and can lead to an unwanted loss of POD credit. When no more credit is available, active jobs are stopped and license hours can't be recovered.
An example of POD deposit detail is shown below for a sample user:
Sometimes you may not wish to kill all jobs in your machine but just some of them, and the JobID can be very helpful. Any JobID is made up of several parts split by underscores; here is an example of the information we can extract from a JobID:
An important note about the behaviour of user-created PoD license keys: you can create a key accounting for a limited hours count, but please be aware that this won't totally save you from wasting PoD hours. Any user-created key is indeed allowing you to start jobs if it has available credit, and is preventing you from starting a new job if its credit finished. But the end of the credit doesn't automatically kill running jobs until the next 24 hour deposit is attempted to be withdrawn. During this time you will consume your main PoD hours instead, and you may end up with a loss of hours.
See also the following sections of the User Guide:
Available hours are in green, used ones are in red and the deposited are in yellow. A deposit will exist only if the license is currently in use: if this is not the case, you should see no deposit as in this image:
If the job is still active after one day, 24 hours will be flagged as used and a new deposit of 24 hours is created; this is repeated each day at the same time if the server is not stopped and can lead to an unwanted loss of POD credit. When no more credit is available, active jobs are stopped and license hours can't be recovered.
An example of POD deposit detail is shown below for a sample user:
This case shows a job started on May, 24th which ran for 2 complete days and around 7 hours on the third day.
It's clear that the deposit is renewed each 24 hours, at the exact time the server was started.
It's clear that the deposit is renewed each 24 hours, at the exact time the server was started.
An important note about the behaviour of user-created PoD license keys: you can create a key accounting for a limited hours count, but please be aware that this won't totally save you from wasting PoD hours. Any user-created key is indeed allowing you to start jobs if it has available credit, and is preventing you from starting a new job if its credit finished. But the end of the credit doesn't automatically kill running jobs until the next 24 hour deposit is attempted to be withdrawn. During this time you will consume your main PoD hours instead, and you may end up with a loss of hours.
See also the following sections of the User Guide:
- Getting Started > Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Licensing > Power on Demand Licensing > Viewing Your Power on Demand Account Online
- Getting Started > Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Licensing > Power on Demand Licensing > Managing License Keys