Abaqus

Introduction

Abaqus (external link) is a commercial suite of programs for finite element analysis, including static, dynamic and thermal analysis of materials, with sophisticated options for handling contacts and nonlinear materials.

Typically, researchers will install Abaqus on their own computers to develop models in a graphical user interface (Abaqus CAE) and then run simulations that exceed their local hardware capabilities on ARC. Output from runs on ARC is then transferred back to the researchers' own computers for visualization.

The software can be downloaded, upon approval, from the Information Technologies Software Distribution web site. A student version, for Microsoft Windows computers only, with limitations on model size is available directly from Dassault Systèmes (external link).

Abaqus is available to all U of C researchers with an ARC account, but, due to the limited number of licenses it is important to be thoroughly familiar with the licensing restrictions outlined in the next section.

Licensing considerations

For many years, Information Technologies has provided a limited number of license tokens for research and teaching versions of the Abaqus software, sometimes supplemented by contributions from researchers. The software contract is typically renewed annually in August. If you are interested in contributing to the pool of licenses, you can write to the IT Help Desk itsupport@ucalgary.ca and ask that your email be redirected to the IT software librarian.

The discussion that follows relates only to the research version of the software. Note that the conditions of use of the teaching licenses prohibits them from being used for research projects.

At the time of this writing in May 2020, there are only 83 research license tokens available. The number of tokens available at a given time can be seen by running the lmstat command on ARC:

/global/software/abaqus/2019_licensing_only/linux_a64/code/bin/lmstat -c 27001@abaqus.ucalgary.ca -a

The number of license tokens, t, used for a given job depends on the number of CPU cores, c, requested for Abaqus to use according to the formula t=integer part of (5 * c^0.422). This formula has been implemented on the Abaqus Token Calculator web page (external link), but, here is a table showing some examples.

Cores	Tokens
8	12
12	14
16	16
20	17
24	19
32	21
36	22
40	23
48	25

Generally speaking, unless you have a small model to process, the more cores you use, the more efficiently the license tokens will be used. Similarly, using the fastest hardware available will provide the most value for a given number of license tokens. With those considerations in mind, using a full 40-core compute node, selected by specifying the cpu2019 partition in your batch job (see example scripts below), is preferred . However, as there is often a shortage of license tokens, you will likely have to use just part of a compute node.

Support

Please send any questions regarding using Abaqus on ARC to support@hpc.ucalgary.ca.