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ABAQUS

Finite Element Analysis software for modeling, visualization and best-in-class implicit and explicit dynamics FEA.

ABAQUS Homepage

Warning

ABAQUS is proprietary software. Make sure you meet the requirements for it's usage.

Tip

For a list of ABAQUS commands type:

abaqus help

Available Modules

module load ABAQUS/2020

Licences

The following network licence servers can be accessed from the NeSI cluster.

Institution Faculty Uptime
University of Auckland Faculty of Engineering 98%
University of Waikato 96%

If you do not have access, or want a server connected Contact our Support Team.

You can force ABAQUS to use a specific licence type by setting the parameter academic=TEACHING or academic=RESEARCH in a relevant environment file.

Tip

Required ABAQUS licences can be determined by this simple and intuitive formula ⌊ 5 x N0.422 ⌋ where N is number of CPUs.

Hyperthreading can provide significant speedup to your computations, however hyperthreaded CPUs will use twice the number of licence tokens. It may be worth adding #SBATCH --hint nomultithread to your slurm script if licence tokens are your main limiting factor.

Solver Compatibility

Not all solvers are compatible with all types of parallelisation.
Element operations Iterative Direct Lanczos
mp_mode=threads ✖ ✔ ✔ ✔
mp_mode=mpi ✔ ✔ ✖ ✖

Warning

If your input files were created using an older version of ABAQUS you will need to update them using the command, 

abaqus -upgrade -job new_job_name -odb old.odb
or 
abaqus -upgrade -job new_job_name -inp old.inp

Examples

For when only one CPU is required, generally as part of a job array

#!/bin/bash -e

#SBATCH --job-name      ABAQUS-serial
#SBATCH --time          00:05:00 # Walltime
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task 1
#SBATCH --mem           1500          # total mem
module load ABAQUS/2020
abaqus job="propeller_s4rs_c3d8r" verbose=2 interactive

mp_mode=threads Uses a nodes shared memory for communication. May have a small speedup compared to MPI when using a low number of CPUs, scales poorly. Needs significantly less memory than MPI. Hyperthreading may be enabled if using shared memory but it is not recommended.

#!/bin/bash -e

#SBATCH --job-name      ABAQUS-Shared
#SBATCH --time          00:05:00       # Walltime
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task 4
#SBATCH --mem           2G             # total mem
module load ABAQUS/2020
abaqus job="propeller_s4rs_c3d8r cpus=${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK} \
    mp_mode=threads verbose=2 interactive

Shared memory run with user defined function (fortran or C). Function will be compiled at start of run. You may need to chance the function suffix if you usually compile on windows.

#!/bin/bash -e

#SBATCH --job-name      ABAQUS-SharedUDF
#SBATCH --time          00:05:00       # Walltime
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task 4
#SBATCH --mem           2G         # total mem

module load imkl
module  load ABAQUS/2020
abaqus job="propeller_s4rs_c3d8r" user=my_udf.f90 \
    cpus=${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK} mp_mode=threads verbose=2 interactive

mp_mode=mpi Multiple processes each with a single thread. Not limited to one node. Model will be segmented into -np pieces which should be equal to --ntasks Each task could be running on a different node leading to increased communication overhead. Jobs can be limited to a single node by adding --nodes=1 however this will increase your time in the queue as contiguous cpu's are harder to schedule. This is the default method if mp_mode is left unspecified.

#!/bin/bash -e

#SBATCH --job-name      ABAQUS-Distributed 
#SBATCH --time          00:05:00       # Walltime</span></span>
#SBATCH --ntasks        8
#SBATCH --mem-per-cpu   1500          # Each CPU needs it&#39;s own.
#SBATCH --nodes         1

module load ABAQUS/2020
abaqus job="propeller_s4rs_c3d8r" cpus=${SLURM_NTASKS} mp_mode=mpi \
    verbose=2 interactive

The GPU nodes are limited to 16 CPUs In order for the GPUs to be worthwhile, you should see a speedup equivalent to 56 CPU's per GPU used. GPU modes will generally have less memory/cpus.

#!/bin/bash -e

#SBATCH --job-name      ABAQUS-gpu
#SBATCH --time          00:05:00       # Walltime</span></span>
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task 4
#SBATCH --mem           4G         # total mem</span></span>
#SBATCH --gpus-per-node 1
module load ABAQUS/2020
module load CUDA
abaqus job="propeller_s4rs_c3d8r" cpus=${SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK} \
gpus=${SLURM_GPUS_PER_NODE} mp_mode=threads \
verbose=2 interactive

User Defined Functions

User defined functions (UDFs) can be included on the command line with the argument user=<filename> where <filename> is the C or fortran source code.

Extra compiler options can be set in your local abaqus_v6.env file.

The default compile commands are for imkl, other compilers can be loaded with module load, you may have to change the compile commands in your local .env file.

Environment file

The ABAQUS environment file contains a number of parameters that define how the your job will run, some of these you may with to change.

These parameters are read in the following order of preference,

../ABAQUS/SMA/site/abaqus_v6.env Set by NeSI and cannot be changed.

~/abaqus_v6.env (your home directory) If exists, will be used in all jobs submitted by you.

<working directory>/abaqus_v6.env If exists, will used in this job only.

You may want to include this short snippet when making changes specific to a job.

# Before starting abaqus
echo "parameter=value
parameter=value
parameter=value" > "abaqus_v6.env"

# After job is finished.
rm "abaqus_v6.env"

Performance

ABAQUS_speedup_SharedVMPI.png

Note: Hyperthreading off, testing done on small mechanical FEA model. Results highly model dependant. Do your own tests.

Common Issues

Unable to create temporary directory

This may be caused by using a path for the job parameter. e.g.

abaqus job="/nesi/project/nesi99999/my_input.inp"

ABAQUS cannot create subdirectories, leading to the error message about permissions. This can be fixed by using the input parameter, e.g.

abaqus input="/nesi/project/nesi99999/my_input.inp" job="my_input"