LS-DYNA

Introduction

LS-DYNA is available on all Compute Canada systems. It is used for many applications to solve problems in multi-physics, solid mechanics, heat transfer and fluid dynamics either as separate phenomena or as coupled physic such as thermal stress or fluid structure interaction. LSTC was recently purchased by ANSYS therefore the software maay eventually be provided as part of the ansys module. For now we recommended using the the ls-dyna module as documented in the below wiki document.

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 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/ on each cluster where you plan to submit ls-dyna jobs. 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. To check your new license file is responding run the following commands:

module load ls-dyna
ls-dyna_s

The output should contain lines with values for Licensed to: and Issued by: simply hit ^c to exit.

Cluster Batch Job Submission

LS-DYNA provides binaries for running jobs on single node shared memory systems and over multiple nodes to distribute the memory and computations with mpi. Template instructions for single node use are provided below. Instructions for running jobs across multiple nodes are being prepared and will also be posted when ready.

Running LS-DYNA on a single node

The modules available for running a job on a single node with 1 or more cores can be listed with: module spider ls-dyna. Job can be submitted to the queue with: sbatch myscript.sh. The following is a sample submission script for running LS-DYNA with eight cores on a single cluster compute node:

File : myscript.sh

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --account=some-account # Specify
#SBATCH --time=0-03:00         # 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

Depending on the complexity of the simulation, LS-DYNA may not be able to efficiently use very many cores. Therefore before running a simulation to completion, test the scaling properties of the simulation by gradually increasing the number of cores in #SBATCH --cpus-per-task=X from X=1 to determine the optimum value.

Remote visualization

LSTC provides LS-PrePost for pre and post processing of LS-DYNA models. It does not require a license and can be used on any Compute Canada system. To use it on any cluster node or the graham VDI nodes follow these steps:

Cluster Nodes

Connect to a compute or login node with TigerVNC
module load ls-prepost
lsprepost

VDI Nodes

Connect to gra-vdi with TigerVNC
module load CcEnv StdEnv
module load ls-prepost
lsprepost