Abaqus on multiple workstations

[dag84]

We are currently running Abaqus jobs on a 12 core, 72Gb RAM machine. We are thinking about purchasing additional tokens and another workstation, to hopefully run 24 core simultaneously. Does anyone have any experience with running jobs split between 2 workstations, and what is necessary in terms of hardware/software?

Thanks,
Drew

 

[GenericUser]

I am curious about this as well. I spent the last 2 days trying to do this using the mp_host_list abaqus environment option. It seems most people do not use this option because they are running a queue program like PBS or Platform LFS on a Windows HPC cluster.

I can share with you what I have learned so far. When you install Abaqus it should by default install a few Microsoft HPC binaries. On my machine I set the option "mpi_host_list" to the list of the machine names and number of cpus I want to use. This included both my machine and another machine I want to run on.

I created an account on the other machine that has the same user name and password on my machine. I then run smpd (one of the HPC commands that Abaqus installs) on both machines. When I use the abaqus command line option to run the job (abaqus job=<job name>), I get an error indicating that Abaqus cannot set the working directory on the remote machine and that I should check and see if I can run remote commands on the other machine without authentication. So I type "mpiexec -hosts 1 <other machine name> hostname" and it works just fine.

From what I gather Abaqus is trying to open a rsh shell on the remote machine and failing. I have no idea at this point how to get it to work. It took me hours to reach to point I mentioned, so while I don't know the answer, this info might still be helpful.

Again I would be very interested in knowing if anyone got a job running on two machines without creating a cluster or using a queue system because that's just not in our budget right now.