PowerFLOW at PDC

PowerFLOW Usage Information

PowerFLOW is commercial software and PDC does not have a site license for the software, so users must provide their own license to the software. The environment variable

LM_LICENSE_FILE

Should be set to point to the license server.

Note these instructions are for normal PDC users, Scania users should read the Scania instructions instead.

Running PowerFLOW at PDC

Lindgren

Version 4.3c of powerflow has been compiled to run natively on Lindgren. Earlier versions require CCM which is a different procedure and described in this page

Running interactively on Lindgren

Several nodes on Lindgren are reserved for interactive use. These nodes have a simple first in first out queue system, if there are not enough free nodes available.

To see the number of free interactive nodes use the command

xtnodestat | grep interactive

Additionally nodes can be reserved for interactive use using the queue system using a command such as

qsub -I -l mppwidth=72 -l walltime=30:00

Then powerflow can be started using

module load powerflow/4.3c
exaqsub -simnprocs  48 -simulate -f *.cd

Running in batch mode on Lindgren

To run in the batch queue is similar, a job script should be submitted to the queue.

Example job script

# The name of the script is myjob
#PBS -N myjob

# Only 1 hour wall-clock time will be given to this job
#PBS -l walltime=1:00:00

# Number of cores to be allocated is 288.
# always request full nodes, i.e. mppwidth should normally be a multiple of 24
#PBS -l mppwidth=288

# Change to the work directory
cd $PBS_O_WORKDIR

#enable modules in the queue system
. /opt/modules/default/etc/modules.sh

module load powerflow/4.3c

exaqsub -simnprocs 264 -simulate -f *.cdi

Note with powerflow one node is used to coordinate the worker tasks, so the size of the job given by

#PBS -l mppwidth=288

should be exactly one node (24 cores) larger than the size of the job on the exaqsub line

exaqsub -simnprocs 264 -simulate -f *.cdi

Note the -f flag here is important, as the job will end  will return when exaqsub returns to the command line. This happens immediately if the -f flag is not used, so the job will be killed by the queue system after only a few seconds without the -f flag.