What is the Dassault Systems Software Package?

The Dassault Systems (DS) Software Package (3DEXPERIENCE, Catia, Solidworks, Simulia, Abaqus,...) is an engineering and scientific software suite applicable for the simulation of computational structural mechanics (CSM), acoustics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), electro-magnetics and multi-body simulations and much more applications. Currently at LRZ Linux Cluster Systems out of the multitude of different Dassault Systems simulation tools and applications Abaqus is supported, which can be accessed either through its GUI or by using its command line interface, e.g. in so-called batch mode on the Linux Cluster and SuperMUC-NG for single-node and distributed parallel processing using the SLURM scheduler.

The Dassault Systems Applications being Supported at LRZ

Abaqus (Structural Mechanics)

Licensing

Currently the LRZ owns only a rather limited number of Dassault/Abaqus test licenses, which serve mainly the purpose of DS software installation, testing and provisioning for LRZ users from the three Munich universities - TUM, LMU and HM. Users being interested in using Abaqus or any other DS software portfolio components need to license the software by themselves with Dassault Systems and need to provide their purchsed software licenses through a suitably installed Dassault Systems license server. Interested users and researchers need to contact Dassault Systems Sales Representatives directly or they can obtain further information through the LRZ Service Desk. On a per request basis the LRZ can offer the hosting of DS license servers with user provided license keys for the DS software on LRZ hardware (for chairs of TUM, LMU, HM).

For academic research purposes of students and employees of the TU Munich (TUM) there is already an established Dassault Systems license pool (Catia, Abaqus), currently being owned by approx. 15 different professorships and institutes of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of TUM. The existing license pool consists of both research and teaching licenses. Interested users from the TU Munich (TUM) are adviced to contact the Department of Metal Forming and Casting (TUM-MW, UTG) for further information.

For local installation of the software, license owners should download the software installation packages from Dassault Systems own support and software download portal.

Actual and Default Version

Since January 2024 the latest release version of the Dassault Systems Software Package is named "Simulia 2024". This new version of Simulia Software Suite (Abaqus) Version 2024 has been made available. But due to Dassault's software development, this new version is requiring the operating system version SLES15 SP4 or higher. Therefore this version will not be available on CoolMUC-2/3 clusters anymore. Currently supported systems for this new Abaqus version 2024 are CoolMUC-4, SuperMUC-NG and Linux Cluster housing systems being equiped with Intel Skylake/Cascade Lake processors and running SLES15 SP4 as well.

For this reason the Simulia Software Suite (Abaqus) Version 2023 will remain until further notice the default version / software module of the Abaqus software on the LRZ Linux Clusters and on SuperMUC-NG. In the future older versions of the Dassault Systems software will still be provided as separate modules in the module system for a time frame of about 2-3 calendar years. After this 2-3 years support period outdated versions of the Dassault Systems software will be deprecated as a LRZ software module. Older versions of Abaqus remain available as individual modules in the system and can be selected by explicitely specifying the version in the module command.

Important Note:
Due to incompatibilities of Intel MPI 2017 in earlier versions of Abaqus (2020-2022) on the operating system SLES15 on Linux Clusters CM2, CM4, Serial and the Teramem machine, on these named machines only abaqus/2023 is supported. The earlier versions of Abaqus might not work properly under SLES15 anymore. Only on the old Linux Cluster CoolMUC-3 (mpp3) the earlier versions of Abaqus are still provided as modules and are supposed to still work until the end of the calendar year 2023 on this machine, i.e. CoolMUC-3 only.

SSH User Environment Settings

As described in the LRZ documentation "Using Secure Shell on LRZ HPC Systems → LRZ internal configuration", some applications require special SSH keys for the cluster internal communication. Abaqus, the CSM solver by Dassault Systems, and potentially other packages from the overall Simulia software portfolio as well, belongs to this class of applications.

Therefore Abaqus software users should follow the SSH setup steps as outlined here. This section is only relevant for setting up ssh to work without passwords (and without ssh-agent) inside the cluster. This is needed for e.g. batch process startup in some MPI implementations. None of the keys (public or private) generated here should be transferred outside the cluster, since this may incur security problems. The following commands must therefore be executed on the LRZ target system, i.e. one of the Linux Cluster or SuperMUC-NG login nodes.

Getting Started

LRZ users are adviced NOT to use Linux Cluster or SuperMUC-NG login nodes for any kind of Dassault Systems simulations which have the potential to put some heavy processor load on these login node systems or which are potentially consuming large amounts of memory in order not to disturb other cluster users. For such purposes large memory nodes are provided e.g. in interactive cluster queues.

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

> module avail abaqus

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

> module load abaqus/2023

For parallel execution of the Dassault Systems individual software applications (so far only Abaqus is supported at LRZ) in the LRZ Linux Cluster and SuperMUC-NG batch queuing systems (SLURM) please refer to the provided application-specific subpages of this documentation. If the software of your choice is not yet listed as an available software module, please contact the LRZ application support team.

Documentation

The Dassault Systems software documentation can be accessed on a Abaqus Documentation Webserver.

On LRZ systems with available Abaqus installation the available help on command line options can further be accessed by:

> module load abaqus/2023
> abaqus -help

Mailing List for Dassault Systems Software Users

Users of the LRZ licenses for Dassault Systems software products may join the mailinglist ds.software@lists.lrz.de. This list will provide the user with important information about Dassault Systems (DS) software installation at LRZ (e.g. announcement of new versions, system configuration changes or important updates).

More information about Dassault Systems software related mailinglist at LRZ may be found here.

User Support

In case of any observed issues in the usage of the Dassault Systems software (Simulia, Abaqus) on LRZ managed compute resources or any arising questions, please feel free to contact the LRZ Service Desk. Please submit your LRZ Service Request with a clear specification of the encountered issue with the Dassault Systems software, e.g. by indicating in the request subject "DS / Abaqus issue: ....". This will help the LRZ operators to assign your support request to the most appropriate LRZ staff to assist you.