Abaqus

Abaqus FEA is a software suite for finite element analysis and computer-aided engineering.

Using your own license

Abaqus is available on Compute Canada clusters, but you must provide your own license. Create in your account a file named $HOME/.licenses/abaqus.lic containing this single line:

File : abaqus.lic

prepend_path("LM_LICENSE_FILE","port@server", ";")

...replacing port@server with the port number and name of your Abaqus license server.

Your license server must be reachable by our compute nodes, so your firewall will need to be configured appropriately. This usually requires our technical team to get in touch with the technical people managing your license software. Please contact our technical support and we will provide a list of IP addresses used by our clusters and obtain the information we need on the port and IP address of your server.

Submission script

Below is an example submission script for a small Abaqus Explicit job running on four cores:

File : file.txt

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --time=1-00:00
#SBATCH --mem=2500M
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=4
 
module load abaqus/6.14.1
unset SLURM_GTIDS
export MPI_IC_ORDER='tcp'

abaqus job=Job-SBS-ALU-EXPLICIT-01 input=2018-04-14-SBS-ALUMINUM-EXPLICIT-01.inp memory="2 gb" scratch=$SCRATCH cpus=4 interactive

Abaqus command line options

You can get a list of Abaqus' command line options with abaqus -help. There are a lot of options, so you may wish to pipe the output into a pagination program, e.g.:

[name@gra-vdi4]$ abaqus -help | less

Using the graphical interface

Graham VDI

See Graham VDI Nodes.

The gra-vdi machine can be used to run Abaqus interactively with the Sharcnet licenses by any Compute Canada member. Further details regarding how to connect with tigervnc are described below. The license can also be used for running jobs by connecting to dusky.sharcnet.ca. Once connected load the following module:

module load abaqus/2019-sn

If an Abaqus job fails to get a license upon startup, it must be manually killed otherwise it will sit idle on the compute node until its "sqsub -r runtime" limit is reached, and the queue automatically kills it off. One can tell if a job is in an idle state by inspecting the job output file then killing it with the sqkill or scancel commands.

[roberpj@dus241:~/test-abaqus] cat ofile.93249
Abaqus JOB myjob
Abaqus 6.13-3
"standard" license request queued for the License Server.
Total time in queue: 0 seconds.
"standard" license request queued for the License Server.
Total time in queue: 30 seconds.
"standard" license request queued for the License Server.
Total time in queue: 60 seconds.
etc

Running CAE GUI on a viz or VDI workstation

To connect, we recommend installing the tigervnc client on your desktop, as described in https://docs.computecanada.ca/wiki/VNC. To run Abaqus interactivly in GUI mode use gra-vdi.computecanada.ca. This machine is located at uw so the uwo engineering/robarts combined licenses cannot be used.

1) connect to gra-vdi.computecanada.ca with tigervnc
2) module load StdEnv
3) module load abaqus/2019-sn
4) abaqus cae

Message Passing Interface