Abaqus

The aim of this guide is to provide basic information and example job scripts for how to run Abaqus on the University of Bristol HPC systems BlueCrystal Phase 4 and BluePebble.

Note

The content of this guide is open source, and contributions are welcomed from the Abaqus user community! If you see something wrong in this guide or have something to add, then please see here for how to get involved and contribute.

Some basic familiarity with the Linux command line and remote HPC systems is assumed; if you are unfamiliar or need a refresher, then the following courses are recommended:

Setup

Important

Before using Abaqus at the university, you must first register for an Abaqus license - speak to your supervisor for how to do this and to obtain a charge code for the license.

Abaqus is available as a module on BlueCrystal Phase 4 and BluePebble and can be loaded into the shell environment using

$ module load apps/abaqus/2018

You can verify if Abaqus has been setup correctly by running the following command:

$ abaqus information=version

If you are using custom user subroutines, you will also need to load the Intel Fortran compiler:

$ module load languages/intel/2020-u4

$ module load lang/intel-parallel-studio-xe/2020

Fair Use

Important

Abaqus licenses are shared across the university in a fair-use manner: this means that you should not run a large number of Abaqus jobs simultaneously as this prevents other users from running Abaqus.

  • You should not be using more than 400 license credits at a time; run the command abaqus licensing dslsstat -usage in the command line to see how many license credits you are currently using.

  • As a rough guide, limit yourself to a maximum of 8 non-parallel jobs or 3 parallel jobs running simultaneously.

  • If you are running batch array jobs with slurm, you can use the % operator to limit the maximum number of concurrently running array tasks.

Warning

If you have more than 400 licenses in use, then your jobs may be terminated without warning to allow others to use the licenses.

Running Jobs

Tip

If you are using Abaci to develop and run jobs with user subroutines, you can easily submit HPC jobs to Slurm with the abaci submit command.