Ansys, now part of Synopsys, sells simulation software for every scale of a data center: the chips, the servers, the power delivery, the air in the hall and the plant that cools it. None of it is data center software out of the box. These are general engineering tools, and which one you need depends on the question you are asking.
Which product for which question
| The question | Ansys product | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| How hot do the chips, boards and servers get? Is the heat sink or cold plate big enough? | Ansys Icepak | CFD for electronics cooling: packages, boards, enclosures and servers |
| Where does the air go in the hall? Which racks take in hot air, and what happens when a cooling unit fails? | Ansys Fluent | General-purpose CFD: airflow, heat transfer and turbulence in any geometry |
| How does the whole facility behave once it is running? | Ansys Twin Builder | Digital twins built from reduced-order models of each part, which equipment vendors can supply |
| Which of many design options is best? | Ansys optiSLang | Design optimization that runs a solver over many variants |
| Is the power reaching the racks balanced and clean? | Ansys Maxwell and Q3D Extractor | Electromagnetic field and parasitic extraction solvers |
| Will the solder joints and components last? | Ansys Sherlock | Reliability prediction for electronics, including solder fatigue |
| Will a structure or part hold up under load? | Ansys Mechanical | Structural analysis by the finite element method |
Ansys’s own data center page lists more, down to chip-level power tools now sold under the Synopsys name.
Cooling questions belong to the first two rows, Icepak and Fluent, and that is what the rest of this page is about.
Icepak and Fluent: the two that model cooling
Ansys Icepak is CFD built for electronics. It knows the parts a thermal engineer works with, such as fans, heat sinks, vents and circuit boards, meshes them, and solves with the Fluent solver. It runs inside Ansys Electronics Desktop. If you design servers, boards or cold plates, Icepak is the tool for the job.
Ansys Fluent is general-purpose CFD. It solves airflow, heat transfer and turbulence in any geometry, from a jet engine to a data hall. Ansys’s own articles describe using it to place cooling units, compare rack layouts and find hot spots. Fluent has no notion of a rack or a CRAC, though. Every rack, cooling unit, floor tile and containment panel has to be drawn as geometry, given its airflow and heat, meshed and set up by hand.
Running either one yourself takes three things: an Ansys license, a computer big enough to solve the model, and an engineer who knows CFD well enough to set it up and judge the answer. For a team that designs electronics or runs CFD every day, that is the right investment. For a team that needs to know whether a data hall will keep its racks’ intake air within limits, it is usually more than the question needs.
How CoolSim uses Ansys Fluent and Icepak
CoolSim is data center CFD software built on both. It was first developed at Fluent, Inc. in 2005. Fluent is now part of Ansys, and Applied Math Modeling, which makes CoolSim, is an Ansys Technology Partner.
- You build the room from data center equipment: racks, cooling units, floor tiles, ducts and containment, named the way a data center team names them.
- We mesh it with Ansys Icepak and solve it with Ansys Fluent on our servers. Meshing, solving and post-processing all run there.
- You get a report: the intake temperature of every rack, the flow through every tile, maps and pathlines of the air, and the room’s cooling metrics.
- Every job is checked before its report is sent: the solution has to settle and the heat has to balance. How we know it’s right lists the checks.
So there is no Ansys license, CFD workstation or solver setup on your side. CoolSim is an annual subscription that includes the cloud compute, measured in Compute Units, and Licensing explains the plans. More than 31,000 customer simulations have been delivered this way since 2016.
Or let our engineers run it
If you would rather not build the model, our CFD engineers will. They build the room or site from your drawings, run the cases and walk you through the results. Studies covers what we run, including cooling-failure studies and campus airflow studies.
When to use Ansys directly instead
CoolSim models rooms and sites, not the equipment inside the racks. Use Icepak or Fluent directly when the question is inside the box:
- Designing a server, board, heat sink or cold plate. That is Icepak’s job.
- Detailed liquid cooling: the flow inside cold plates, manifolds and coolant loops.
- Equipment or physics CoolSim doesn’t model, where you need full control of the geometry and the solver settings.