Overview

Abaqus – a computer-aided engineering suite based upon finite element analysis (FEA), is developed by Dassault Systèmes and is provided for commercial use through Fidelis Engineering Associates. The software offers computationally efficient and comprehensive solutions for a variety of multi-physics and sophisticated engineering problems that covers a range of industrial applications.

Available Versions

Licensing Information

The software is available to use in serial and parallel mode on ISAAC NG and ISAAC Secure Enclave cluster for all ISAAC users and also supports GPU acceleration. As the purchased license is commercial, therefore, there is no restriction on using it for academic or commercial/contract-based research. The license for Abaqus include:

• Abaqus/CAE – The graphical user interface (GUI) to the software.
• Abaqus/Standard – A general-purpose iterative solver employing an implicit integration scheme. 
• Abaqus/Explicit – Employs explicit integration to solve dynamic problems.
• Abaqus/Tosca – Optimization tool

CPUs

The High Performance and Scientific Computing (HPSC) group at OIT has obtained a commercial license for Abaqus. Abaqus allow using Abaqus license through a token system. HPSC group is licensed to use a maximum of 26 tokens for computation and analysis. Please note that these tokens do not correspond to the tokens needed to open the Abaqus/CAE GUI, which has only 4 licenses. The four licenses of Abaqus/CAE allow the users to open the 4 GUIs of Abaqus simultaneously.

Each individual Abaqus job takes 5 tokens to run. However, the number of checked out tokens vary for parallel jobs based upon the below formula :

Number of analysis tokens = INT(5 * (number of cores requested)0.422)

Here, INT stands for considering only integer value of the output. Based upon the above equation, the number of tokens needed to run Abaqus jobs on different number of cores are shown in the below table:

From the above table we see that as the number of cores are increasing, the checked-out tokens to do parallel simulation increases, but this increase is non-linear. Therefore, we recommend the Abaqus users to check the license usage before submitting the jobs using the below command and do not submit the job if there are very few tokens left.

module load abaqus/2022

abaqus licensing ru

The output of above command will list a bunch of information about the licenses and tokens. The checked-out tokens will be printed on the top with the information about which user has checked out the tokens.

GPUs

Abaqus license server checks out only five token for a GPU job which is similar to running a single CPU or serial job, however the number of tokens will increase if the number of CPUs cores are increased in a computational job. Additionally, it is worth mentioning here that the current license for Abaqus allows running GPU jobs only using the Standard solver.

Important Note: It is highly probable that the SLURM scheduler allocated the compute nodes, but user does not see any progress in the calculation. This is because the Abaqus solvers require the tokens to be checked out from the license server to start the computation and will wait until it checks them out. We recommend checking the available tokens before you submit an Abaqus job.