LS-DYNA

Introduction

LS-DYNA "is used to solve multi-physics problems including solid mechanics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics either as separate phenomena or as coupled physics, e.g., thermal stress or fluid structure interaction."

Licensing

Compute Canada is a hosting provider for LS-DYNA. This means that we have LS-DYNA software installed on our clusters, but we do not provide a generic license accessible to everyone. However, many institutions, faculties, and departments already have licenses that can be used on our clusters. Researchers can also purchase a dedicated license directly from the company for use on Compute Canada systems to run on a Sharnet license server.

Once a license is setup, there will be remaining technical aspects. The license server on your end will need to be reachable by our compute nodes. This will require our technical team to get in touch with the technical people managing your license software. In some cases, this has already been done. You should then be able to load a ls-dyna Compute Canada modules, and it should find your license automatically. For assistance please contact our Technical support.

Configuring your own license file

Our module for LS-DYNA is designed to look for license information in a few places. One of those places is your home folder. If you have your own license server, you can write the information to access it in the following format:

File : ls-dyna.lic

#LICENSE_TYPE: network
#LICENSE_SERVER:<port>@<server>

and put this file in the folder $HOME/.licenses/. Note that firewall changes will need to be done on both our side and your side. To arrange this, send an email containing the service port and ip address of your floating license server to Technical support.

Running LS-DYNA on a single node

Below is a sample submission script for running LS-DYNA with eight cores on a single cluster compute node:

File : myscript1.sh

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --account=some-account # Specify
#SBATCH --time=0-00:05         # d-hh:mm
#SBATCH --mem=2G               # Change
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=4      # Change
#SBATCH --nodes=1              # Do not change

module load ls-dyna/11.0

ls-dyna_s i=airbag.deploy.k ncpu=$SLURM_CPUS_ON_NODE

where

ls-dyna_s - single precision solver
ls-dyna_d - double precision solver

To submit your job to the queue use: sbatch myscript1.sh. Depending on the complexity of the simulation, LS-DYNA may not be able to efficiently use very many cores. Therefore please test the scaling of your simulation by increasing the number of cores in #SBATCH --cpus-per-task=X from X=1 to the maximum number of cores on the compute node you are using to determine the optimal value.