Abaqus

Several versions of Abaqus are installed on our systems, use the command module avail abaqus to see the exact versions available.

Licensing

Abaqus is a commercial product and requires you to have a suitable license entitlement before you can run. Jobs must be explicitly configured to point to the license server that hold your license entitlement. In the job script add the line:

export LM_LICENSE_FILE=port@hostname

before running Abaqus. Your group leader will know the correct port@hostname details for their licenses.

If you have no license entitlement, licenses can be purchased from the ICT Technology Store.

Please note that RCS do not provide any licenses for Abaqus.

Checkpointing your work

Abaqus has a built-in checkpoint and restart feature. This allows you to save your work as you go allow and to restart if a job fails or over runs. To enable checkpointing add the following to your input file:

*RESTART, WRITE, OVERLAY, FREQUENCY=10

OVERLAY maintains a single copy and overwrites it each save. FREQUENCY=10 saves the restart information every 10 time steps. Please ensure you are saving at a reasonable rate partially if you have a large simulation as it could strain the RDS.

To restart the job, create a new input file newJobName with only a single line:

*RESTART, READ

Then run Abaqus specifying both the new and old job names:

abaqus jobname=newJobName oldjob=oldJobName

Please see Abaqus documentation for more details

Analyse and visualise results

Once you have your results we recommend using ABAQUS on your local machine instead of using X-forwarding to open a window from the cluster. You should be able to get ABAQUS 2024 (Teaching License) via SoftwareHub from which you can open the CAE. After mounting the RDS on local you can then open the .odb file as normal.