Star-CCM+
STAR-CCM+ is an all-in-one solution that delivers accurate and efficient multidisciplinary technologies in a single integrated user interface; it is developed by Siemens.
License limitations
Compute Canada has the authorization to host STAR-CCM+ binaries on its servers, but does not provide licenses to users. You will need to have your own license in order to use this software.
Running Star-CCM+ on Compute Canada servers
Select one of the available modules:
- starccm for the double-precision flavour,
- starccm-mixed for the mixed precision flavour.
Star-CCM+ comes bundled with two different distributions of MPI:
- IBM Platform MPI is the default distribution, but does not work on Cedar's Intel OmniPath network fabric;
- Intel MPI is specified with option -mpi intel.
Neither IBM Platform MPI nor Intel MPI are tightly coupled with our scheduler; you must therefore tell starccm+ which host to use by means of a file containing the list of available hosts. To produce this file, we provide the slurm_hl2hl.py script, which will output the list of hosts when called with the option --format STAR-CCM+. This list can then be written to a file and read by Star-CCM+. Also, because these distributions of MPI are not tightly integrated with our scheduler, you should use options --ntasks-per-node=1 and --cpus-per-task=32 when submitting a job.
You will also need to set up your job environment to use your license. If you are using Adapco's online "pay-on-usage" server, the configuration is rather simple. If you are using an internal license server, please contact us so that we can help you setup the access to it. When all is done, your submit script should look like this, where 2 nodes are used for 1 hour; you can adjust these numbers to fit your needs.
#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --time=01:00:00
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=32
module load starccm/12.04.011-R8
export LM_PROJECT='YOUR ADAPCO PROJECT ID GOES HERE'
export CDLMD_LICENSE_FILE="1999@flex.cd-adapco.com"
slurm_hl2hl.py --format STAR-CCM+ > machinefile
NCORE=$((SLURM_NTASKS * SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK))
starccm+ -power -np $NCORE -machinefile machinefile -batch -mpi intel /path/to/your/simulation/file