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Design Manager
Design Manager provides an automated approach within Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to run design exploration studies. Design exploration covers both performance assessment and optimization.
Design Manager Workflow
The following steps outline the recommended workflow to set up, run, and post-process a design study in Design Manager.
Running a Design Study
Design Manager provides various settings to control the run of a design study and the compute resources to use.
Running on a Linux Cluster Using Pre-Allocation
Running in an Interactive Session
If your cluster management system allows interactive login sessions, you can run design studies in an interactive session.

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Design Manager
Design Manager provides an automated approach within Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to run design exploration studies. Design exploration covers both performance assessment and optimization.
- Study Inputs
  In Design Manager, study inputs are parameters that you define in the reference simulation and that Design Manager can modify during design studies.
- Study Outputs
  For each design simulation in a design study, Design Manager allows you to record and write specific outputs.
- Surrogate Models
  In Design Manager, a surrogate is a predictive function that returns an estimated response value for a given set of numerical input parameters. Design Manager computes surrogate functions by fitting data from design study simulations to chosen surrogate models such as Kriging or Least Squares.
- Study Types
  Design Manager offers several types of design study by which you can explore the design space of your product.
- Study Runs
  Design Manager allows you to run design studies on your local workstation or on a high performance cluster. You can run the design simulations sequentially or concurrently, in serial or in parallel. In addition, you can customize the simulation run by inserting Java macros that contain additional setup for the simulation. Design Manager optimizes runs by caching meshes and reusing them where possible.
- Study Analysis
  Design Manager provides post-processing capabilities by which you can analyze the outputs of a design study.
- Design Manager Licensing
  The licenses that are required for running a design study in Design Manager depend on the type of study and the specified run settings. Also, different steps within the Design Manager workflow have particular license requirements.
- Design Manager Workflow
  The following steps outline the recommended workflow to set up, run, and post-process a design study in Design Manager.
  - Setting Up the Reference Simulation
    Every design study requires a reference simulation from which to start. In this reference simulation you create and expose the design and global parameters by which Design Manager can modify the simulation setup. You also prepare reports, plots, and scenes for feedback and analysis.
  - Creating a Design Manager Project
    The process for creating a Design Manager project is integrated within the same user interface as you use for a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulation.
  - Setting Up a Design Study
    Setting up a design study requires that you choose the type of study, set its properties, and choose appropriate input parameters and responses. Additionally, you choose scenes and plots that you want Design Manager to export from each design simulation.
  - Running a Design Study
    Design Manager provides various settings to control the run of a design study and the compute resources to use.
    - Running Locally
      For small simulation sizes, a local machine with a high number of cores and memory can give sufficient compute resource for a design study.
    - Running on a Linux Cluster Using General Job Submission
    - Running on a Linux Cluster Using Pre-Allocation
      - Pre-Allocation Submission Script Requirements
        In pre-allocation mode, you submit the entire Design Manager project as a single job to the cluster queue.
      - Running on a Linux Cluster with Local Scratch Space
        Clusters with local scratch space on each compute node can handle high performance input/output from many nodes simultaneously. To run Design Manager on such a cluster, the submission script must meet certain requirements. For design studies with mesh reuse, Design Manager must split the designs that require a mesh to be generated into two runs in order to make the cached mesh accessible for other designs.
      - Running in an Interactive Session
        If your cluster management system allows interactive login sessions, you can run design studies in an interactive session.
      - Running on a Group of Machines
        You can submit a Design Manager project on a group of networked machines using the command line.
    - Running on a Windows HPC Cluster Using General Job Submission
      To run a Design Manager project on a Windows HPC cluster, you must submit the project in general job submission mode. General job submission means that Design Manager submits each design simulation individually to the HPC Job Scheduler.
    - Stopping, Extending, and Resuming a Design Study
      You can stop, extend, and resume one or more design studies in a single action.
    - Design Studies: Abort and Resuming after Abort
      Design Manager can abort for reasons such as hardware conflicts or lack of system resources. When it does abort, you can resume the aborted design study from the last completed design.
    - Re-running a Design Study or Selected Designs
      After running a design study you can re-run the entire design study with modified settings or selected designs due to run failure.
    - Assessing Impact of Modified Constraints
      After running the design studies, you can modify constraints and assess the impact of the change on results without re-running the design study.
  - Monitoring a Design Study
    In the GUI, you can check the progress of a running design study in the progress and status bar beneath the explorer window. You can also view post-processing objects while a design study runs, allowing you to view progress interactively.
  - Analyzing the Design Study Results
    Design Manager provides a number of post-processing elements by which you can examine the results of a design study. For each design study type, Design Manager gives you a pre-configured design study dashboard that contains the most relevant elements for the study type. Design study dashboards are built on the layout view mechanism within Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
  - Generating and Applying Surrogate Models
    A study runs significantly faster when you compute responses using surrogate models instead of simulations. In Design Manager, a typical application for surrogate models is a Robustness and Reliability study with a large number of sample points in the design space.
  - Analyzing the Design Study Results
    Design Manager provides a number of post-processing elements by which you can examine the results of a design study. For each design study type, Design Manager gives you a pre-configured design study dashboard that contains the most relevant elements for the study type. Design study dashboards are built on the layout view mechanism within Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
  - Launching Design Manager in Teamcenter
    Teamcenter is a product lifecycle management tool, in which you embed and monitor multidisciplinary development stages of a product—from geometry construction, flow analysis, thermal management to material selection. As part of design exploration, Teamcenter supports the creation, modification, and execution of design studies using Design Manager.
- Design Manager Reference
  The following properties and right-click actions are available for a Design Manager project.
- Troubleshooting Design Manager
  If you encounter problems when setting up or running a design study, check these common problem scenarios for advice on how to proceed.

Running in an Interactive Session

If your cluster management system allows interactive login sessions, you can run design studies in an interactive session.

An interactive session allows you to reserve a set of cluster nodes for interactive use. Interactive sessions are useful for debugging or testing Design Manager projects.

To run design studies in an interactive session:

On the cluster head node, request the resources for an interactive session.
Example: qsub -l nodes=5:ppn=12 -I (for a cluster using the cluster management system PBS).

For multiple nodes, ensure that the nodes share the same filesystem.
If the requested resources are available, the cluster management system allocates the specified resources and returns an interactive console on the first of the allocated nodes.
In the interactive console, launch Design Manager.
In an interactive session, the Design Manager server must be associated with Resource Manager. For this reason, you must explicitly launch Resource Manager in the command line.
Example:
```
[STAR-CCM+_INSTALL_DIR]/bin/starlaunch 
--command "[STAR-CCM+_INSTALL_DIR]/star/bin/starccm+ -rsh ssh -server [PROJECT_ROOT_DIR]/[PROJECT].dmprj" 
--slots 0 --batchsystem pbs
```
On your local machine, launch Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and connect to the running Design Manager server, see Making Client-Server Connections.
The Design Manager object tree appears.
Start the design studies interactively from the GUI.
Design Manager runs the associated design simulations on the compute resources that are allocated to the interactive session.
After running the design studies save the project as required and exit the application.