Preferences

Modify the default behavior of the Mechanical Simulation Job Manager with the Preferences dialog box.

Attention: For convenience, the abbreviation MSJM is used to represent Mechanical Simulation Job Manager for the remainder of this page.

To access Preferences, click the button in the upper-right corner of the user interface. The Preferences dialog box contains the following tabs:

• General
• File Transfer
• Local Solve
• Advanced

Each of these tabs is detailed in the sections that follow.

General Preferences

The General tab of the Preferences dialog box contains the following options:

• Launch on system startup: (Enabled by default.) This option causes MSJM to start automatically when the local workstation is started. It is a good practice to leave this option enabled so that scheduled jobs are run even if the computer is restarted. If this option is disabled, MSJM starts when Simulation Mechanical is started.
• Block sleep mode during file transfers: (Enabled by default.) This option is not relevant to the desktop version of Simulation Mechanical. All jobs are run in-place on the local hard drive. Therefore, no file transfer operations take place, unlike Simulation Mechanical 360 (when solving on the cloud).
• Show tasks: (Disabled by default.) When running solutions on the cloud (360 version), files are uploaded to the cloud, and the results are downloaded to the computer after solving. The Upload, Solve, and Download stages are indicated in the Status column of the List view when this option is enabled. Expand the Solve line to see the additional task data. Uploading and downloading tasks do not occur for local solutions. Therefore, the Show tasks option does not provide any additional useful information when running the desktop version of the product.
• Number of days to show finished jobs : (Default = 7.) Jobs launched within this time period are listed under the Complete heading of the MSJM user interface (unless deleted). Increase or decrease this value to show more or fewer jobs, respectively.
• Refresh rate in seconds: (Default = 5.) While jobs are running, information on the job status and progress is updated at the specified time interval. Increase this value to devote more processing time to the solution and less to updating the job status. Since Simulation Mechanical (the desktop version) performs all solutions locally, network traffic from status updates is not a concern. Also, processor time needed for updating the job status is minimal. Therefore, the default refresh rate works well in most, if not all, cases.
• Number of seconds to show a notification: (Default = 10.) The amount of time that Notification messages appear on the screen. You can use this parameter to increase or decrease the appearance time of Notification messages.
• Number of seconds to delay file transfer at startup: (Default = 5.) If a file transfer immediately resumes when MSJM is automatically started (during a Windows® startup), network errors can occur. These errors are often due to a delay in the initialization of the relevant network drivers and connections controlled by Windows®. Since the solutions are all run locally, this setting is not relevant for the desktop version of Simulation Mechanical.

File Transfer Preferences

For the desktop version of Simulation Mechanical, the Preferences File Transfer tab of MSJM contains only one input field:

• File transfer temporary folder: Specifies the folder on the local workstation in which MSJM stores temporary files, such as thumbnail images. Change this location if you experience disk space limitations or would rather place the temporary files elsewhere. The amount of storage space used per by temporary files job is minimal.

Local Solve Preferences

• Minimum free disk space (%): (Default = 10.) When the amount of available disk space falls below this value, MSJM issues a warning to let you know that your disk is nearly full.
• Block sleep mode during Local Solve: (Enabled by default.) Prevents the operating system from going into sleep mode while jobs are running on the local computer. For the desktop version of Simulation Mechanical, all jobs are solved locally.
• Maximum local workers: This setting limits how many of solver instances are allowed to run concurrently. If you are using other applications while running simulations, decrease this number to free up some processing power for the other tasks. If your computer hardware is high-end, and can handle many concurrent tasks, increase this number to shorten the total solution time of the job batch. If you are only running one simulation, or a number fewer than the maximum local workers specified, this setting has no effect on the solution time.

Advanced Preferences

• Verbose logging: (Disabled by default.) Enable this option to output extra details to the Support Log.
• Show time details: Enable this option to display the detailed time history of jobs while in the List view mode. The Scheduled Time, Started Time, and Completed Time are listed in separate columns. When unchecked, time information is presented in a single Time column, in which case only the completed time is reported.
  Note: The time details are always shown in the Details view, regardless of the setting of this option.
• Collect analytic information: Understanding how people use our products is an important tool for continually improving them. Therefore, we collect nonpersonal product usage information using Google Analytics. For this process to be effective, we need to know what product you are using and to understand that you are a unique user. As a result, unless you choose to deactivate this option, we collect the following information:
  • Number of jobs submitted by product
  • Software version used for each job
  • Where jobs are run (on the cloud or locally). For the desktop version of Simulation Mechanical, all jobs are run locally.

  This information is collected and transmitted when a job finishes.

  Note: We collect information regarding how many jobs are run and where they are solved. We do not collect any information about the jobs themselves, nor any information beyond the items in the preceding list. This information is not used to identify or contact you.
• Language: Select the displayed language of the MSJM user interface.
• Reset Columns: Restore the default arrangement of the columns in the List view.
• Show Support Log: Click to view a log of all interactions between MSJM and the local workstation. This file contains records of current and historical jobs for the currently logged-in user.
• Show Server Support Log: Click to view the job server log. This file records the job management activities of the job server, which is a separate Windows® service running along with MSJM. The server support log is not user-specific.
• Text editor to use to view logs: Specify the locally installed text editor program that you prefer to use for viewing MSJM log files.