STAR-CCM+

The STAR-CCM+ engineering simulation tool is installed on the CC software stack.

Getting a license

Licenses are provided by Siemens.

Running using the CC installation

STAR-CCM+ 12.04.011

STAR-CCM+ is only available on the CC software stack. On Niagara you must run the following module commands:

module load CCEnv
module load StdEnv
module load starccm/12.04.011-R8

Setting up your .star-12.04.011 directory

STAR-CCM+ version 12.04.011 will attempt to write to your $HOME/.star-12.04.011 directory. This will work when you are testing your workflow on the login nodes, because they can write to $HOME. However, recall that the compute nodes cannot write to the /home filesystem. If you attempt to run STAR-CCM+ from a compute node using the default configuration, it will fail because STAR-CCM+ cannot write to $HOME/.star-12.04.011.

The solution is to create an alternative directory called $SCRATCH/.star-12.04.011, and create a soft link from $SCRATCH/.star-12.04.011 to $HOME/.star-12.04.011:

mkdir $SCRATCH/.star-12.04.011
ln -s $SCRATCH/.star-12.04.011 $HOME/.star-12.04.011

This will fool Ansys into thinking it is writing to $HOME/.star-12.04.011, when in fact it is writing to $SCRATCH/.star-12.04.011. This command only needs to be run once, though it needs to be run for each version of STAR-CCM+ you run.

Running STAR-CCM+

Example submission script for a job running on 1 node, with max walltime of 4 hours:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=40
#SBATCH --time=4:00:00
#SBATCH --job-name test

# Setup the license server first, prior to loading the modules:
ssh nia-gw -L 1999:flex.cd-adapco.com:1999 -L 2099:flex.cd-adapco.com:2099 -N -f

export LM_PROJECT='XXXX'    # your license information
export CDLMD_LICENSE_FILE="1999@localhost"

# Load the modules and take note of the STAR-CCM+ selected
module load CCEnv
module load StdEnv
module load starccm/12.04.011-R8

# make sure the STAR-CCM+ Ansys directory for the selected version exists prior to submitting 
# the script. See notes above, in particular if/when you change versions.

# DIRECTORY TO RUN - $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR is directory job was submitted from
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

slurm_hl2hl.py --format STAR-CCM+ > machinefile

NCORE=$((SLURM_NTASKS * SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK))

starccm+ -power -np $NCORE -machinefile $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/machinefile -batch your.simulation.inputs.sim >> logfile.log