Affinities can be thought of as special keywords defined by the system administrator to provide additional control of how work items are distributed to stations. Individual adapters in a simulation workflow may be set to have one or more affinities, so that work items for running these adapters can be dispatched only to stations declared to have matching affinities. Predefined affinities include the station name, OS type, OS name, OS version, and OS architecture. In addition to the predefined affinities, you can set custom and required affinities. Any character string can be used for your custom affinity keywords. These keywords must be entered in the client app user interface by end-users. Custom AffinitiesA system administrator can define custom affinities to control work item dispatches in the local environment. For example, if NASTRAN runs on only one computer, a station running on that computer could be declared to have the affinity "Nastran" so that all work items for NASTRAN jobs would automatically be dispatched there. By default, a station has no custom affinities. Required AffinitiesA system administrator can define required affinities for 3DOrchestrate Stations. For example, you can define a required affinity so that only NASTRAN jobs will be dispatched to the station running on the computer that has NASTRAN. A required affinity becomes a precondition to a work item being dispatched to the station. Thus, only adapters with that affinity will be sent to that station. To define a required affinity in the Custom Affinities property of the station configuration, add a “+” before the affinity keyword. Thus a required affinity is indicated by +affinity entry. For example, suppose you have a single station with APPL_X installed. If you only define a normal affinity for APPL_X on that station, you can then use that affinity in your workflow to ensure that the adapter that runs that application (for example, a script adapter) will be dispatched to that station. This is normal affinity behavior. However, this does not prevent other, unrelated work from also being dispatched to your APPL_X station; for example, other task or calculator adapters. These work items can deplete resources on this station that you may prefer be dedicated to running only APPL_X. To create a
station dedicated solely to APPL_X work, specify
the Custom Affinities property as You can give a station more than one required affinity. In this case, the adapter must have both of the required affinities to run on that station. Negative affinities, or excluded affinities, can also be specified with the form | |||||||||