Abaqus has several different ways to run in batch. The first one uses an input file, usually named.inp, or.cae. This file is used as one of the inputs to the abaqus command. In the command line one can specify run parameters, such as parallelization method and CPU count. The second option is to use a Python script, which contains a 'recipe.

Jan-2019: Part1) The sharcnet Abaqus license has been renewed until 17-jan-2020. Users and/or the PIs are going to be required to sign an academic license agreement this year to confirm there will be no commercial use of the software. Previous users will be emailed soon to request signing the agreement.
2.2 Unpack simulia.tar.gz to a destination, say /usr/. This is the license files folder that needs to be started. How to open or Untar a 'tar.gz' file in Linux or Unix: The following tutorial assumes the name of your file is yourfile.tar.gz Replace with your actual filename.

Skip to end of metadataGo to start of metadata

Abaqus is a general purpose Computational Structural Mechanics (CSM) code. Abaqus is part of the Dassault Systems software portfolio since its acquisition from Abaqus Inc. in May 2005. Simulia Abaqus FEA as a leading program in nonlinear finite element analysis and as a general purpose CSM code provides a wide variety of material modeling capabilities, a collection of multiphysics capabilities, such as coupled acoustic-structural, piezoelectric, and structural-pore capabilities. Simulia Abaqus FEA software package includes Abaqus/Standard, Abaqus/Explicit and Abaqus/CFD.

Further information about Abaqus, licensing of the Dassault Systems (DS) software and related terms of software usage at LRZ, the Dassault Systems Software mailing list, access to the Dassault Systems software documentation and LRZ user support can be found on the main Dassault Systems Software documentation page.

Getting Started

Once you are logged into one of the LRZ cluster systems, you can check the availability (i.e. installation) of Abaqus software by:

Load the prefered Abaqus version environment module, e.g.:

One can use Abaqus in interactive GUI mode for the only purpose of pre- and/or postprocessing on the Login Nodes (Linux: SSH Option '-Y' or X11-Forwarding; Windows: using PuTTY and XMing for X11-forwarding). This interactive usage is mainly intended for making quick simulation setup changes, which require GUI access. It is NOT permitted to run computationally intensive Abaqus simulation runs or postprocessing sessions with large memory consumption on Login Nodes. Alternatively Abaqus can be run, e.g. for memory intensive postprocessing and OpenGL acceleration of the GUI on the Remote Visualization Systems.

The Abaqus GUI is started by:

Abaqus CAE GUI on Remote Visualization System (RVS)

For large Abaqus datasets and in the need for pre-/postprocessing them in graphical mode, the GUI of the Abaqus software can be launched on individual nodes of the Remote Visualization System, which is providing graphics capabilities with support of graphics cards. The Remote Visualization System (RVS) is still running the SLES12 operating system and therefore the Abaqus modul(s) are not readily available on this older systems. Nevertheless we are providing here a possibility to run the Abaqus CAE GUI on RVS by invoking the following commands:

In case that you are experiencing 'strange graphical artefacts' in the form of foreground rectangles in Linux desktop background patterns, please delete the following files in your $HOME directory before launching 'abaqus cae' :

This issue needs to be addressed to issues in Dassault Systems Abaqus software graphics programming.

Abaqus Licensing - RESEARCH vs. TEACHING

Two different license types are available for the use of Abaqus software. For scientific research the license type RESEARCH should be used. This license type provides access to the unlimited capability Abaqus solvers. For testing and teaching purposes as well as for computational less intensive tasks requiring only a very limited number of CPU cores the license type TEACHING can and should be used. The TEACHING license type is limited to an execution on 1-4 CPU cores. Therefore the TEACHING license type should be used in the serial queue of the LRZ Linux Clusters (see example provided below). For further possible limitations of the TEACHING license type please refer to the Abaqus documentation by Dassault Systems.

For TUM/UTG users the corresponding license settings in the SLURM scripts (and correspondingly in the local abaqus_v6.env file) are as follows:

License Type	Settings in the SLURM script / abaqus_v6.env file
RESEARCH	license_server_type=FLEXNET abaquslm_license_file='8101@license4.lrz.de' academic=RESEARCH
TEACHING	license_server_type=FLEXNET abaquslm_license_file='8101@license6.lrz.de' academic=TEACHING

Why I should call Abaqus through the Abaqus-Python-Wrapper?

When Abaqus 2020/2021 was installed on the LRZ filesystem for CoolMUC-2, it turned out that the Abaqus software is not working to 100% correctly. The issue experienced and described here is obviously a well known deficiency of the abaqus software on some (but not all) Linux systems. Corresponding descriptions and attempts to mitigate the issue can be found on the internet.

When Abaqus is called on a command line prompt of e.g. a LRZ Linux Cluster login node (for testing purposes and with a small input file), the Abaqus software is carrying out the simulation, until the message string 'THE ANALYSIS HAS COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY' appears in the status file (*.sta). Now it would be expected, that Abaqus is abandoning its work and provides the user again with an accessible command line prompt. Instead the Abaqus Standard process seems to hang and the command line prompt is not made available to the user again. While this is not much of a problem in interactive usage of Abaqus, it becomes a major issue, if an Abaqus simulation should be submitted to a Linux Cluster in batch processing mode. In this case the SLURM job would hang and block cluster resources, until either the user or the SLURM scheduler would terminate the hanging process. Thereby substantial Linux cluster resources would be wasted, because the user defined maximum execution time of the SLURM job might be substantially longer than the actual execution time of the Abaqus simulation.

To mitigate this issue, a Python wrapper for Abaqus is provided. This Python wrapper launches Abaqus in background mode and afterwards it constantly monitors the Abaqus status file (*.sta) of the simulation. If the status file appears in the working directory and contains the success message issued by Abaqus, than it terminates/kills the Abaqus standard process and the simulation is finished.

The Abaqus-Python-wrapper can be called by the following syntax:

The input file should be given without the filename extension, i.e. without .inp. The argument for usage of a User-FORTRAn routine is an optional argument to the Abaqus-Python-Wrapper, i.e. it can be omitted if not required. The above syntax is printed to the screen, if the Abaqus-Python-wrapper is called wiht the '--help' argument:

If there is the arising need to support more command line arguments, which can be recognized by the Abaqus-Python-wrapper and piped through to the Abaqus executable, than please specify your needs in a Service Request to the LRZ application support team.

Abaqus Parallel Execution (Batch Mode)

All parallel Abaqus simulations on LRZ Linux Clusters and SuperMUC-NG are submitted as non-interactive batch jobs to the appropriate scheduling system (SLURM) into the different pre-defined parallel execution queues. Further information about the batch queuing systems and the queue definitions, capabilities and limitations can be found on the documentation pages of the corresponding HPC system (LinuxCluster, SuperMUC-NG)

For job submission to a batch queuing system a corresponding small shell script needs to be provided, which contains:

Batch queueing system specific commands for the job resource definition
Module command to load the Abaqus environment module
Commands

Abaqus License Check Command