How to use Abaqus 6.11 with OpenCL? [GPU computing]

[GenericUser]

Hello All,

I was looking for more ways to squeeze computational performance on my machine when I came across a few press releases from nVidia, Simulia and ATI saying that Abaqus 6.11 is OpenCL compliant and supports GPU computing.

I updated the drivers for my ATI Firepro v8800 and used a 3rd party program, GPU cap viewer, to verify that OpenCL is working correctly and that the GPU is now accessible for computing.

What I need help with is the Abaqus side of things. How do I tell Abaqus to use OpenCL? Where are the settings? I tried the Abaqus Help but there is no mention of OpenCL, GPU computing or anything similar. I tried a variety of google search terms but all it leads to is a bunch of articles that say that Abaqus 6.11 is OpenCL compliant and that it makes a big difference in run times, but nothing else (essentially press releases and articles quoting the press releases).

I've also come across a few hardware vendors who cram multiple graphics cards into a workstation and market it as a High Performance Computer (HPC), and they mention Abaqus 6.11 among the applications it was meant for.

If anyone has used Abaqus with OpenCL or knows how to, I would appreciate any information on how I can make this happen.

 

[loki3000]

there is an option somewhere in the job menu (where you select #cpu and mem)

 

[GenericUser]

Yeah it sounds like the parallelization tab in the job menu. I checked that out but it didn't have anything that looked like GPU or opencl settings. I'll go back and have another look. Thanks.

 

[akabarten]

Hi,

Please take a look for following documentation chapter and all reference there:
Abaqus Release Notes -> 3. Execution -> 3.1 GPGPU direct solver acceleration

I've never used it so that is all help I can give you.

Regards,
Bartosz

 

[xaero24]

Hello,

enabling of GPGPU is quite simple, for example you can submit your job from the Abaqus command via "abaqus job=MyJob gpu=NVIDIA" or by adding the line "gpu=NVIDIA" in the abaqus environment file. However, you also need the accordant GPGPU tokens.

Nevertheless, I doubt this is working with an ATI card.

Kind regards

 

[GenericUser]

Thanks for the information guys. I found what I was looking fore by searching the Help for GPGPU instead of GPU. It certainly seems like only nVidia is supported, but I have seen news releases saying that ATI is supported:

http://develop3d.com/blog/2011/09/a...on-with-opencl-compliant-release-of-abaqus-6.

In any case, I will see if I can dig up gpu environment setting for AMD/ATI cards. I'll let you know what I find.

 

[GenericUser]

Ok I think I figured this out. GPGPU will work with an ATI card, but it is undocumented:

http://develop3d.com/blog/2011/05/a...ulation-times-using-gpu-accelerated-abaqus-fe

In the last paragraph it says "According to AMD, OpenCL support is currently an undocumented, but fully functional feature in Abaqus 6.11"

Through trial and error I firgured out that the GPU envrionment option value for ATI cards is 'AMD'. So you would write gpu=AMD instead of gpu=NVIDIA.

Now I have to see about buying a GPGPU token.

Thanks!