LSF Version 7.3 - Using Platform LSF HPC

Using LSF with FLUENT
LSF is integrated with products from Fluent Inc., allowing FLUENT jobs to take
advantage of the checkpointing and migration features provided by LSF. This increases
the efficiency of the software and means data is processed faster.
FLUENT 5 offers versions based on system vendors’ parallel environments (usually
MPI using the VMPI version of FLUENT 5.) Fluent also provides a parallel version of
FLUENT 5 based on its own socket-based message passing library (the NET version).
This chapter assumes you are already familiar with using FLUENT software and
checkpointing jobs in LSF.
See Administering Platform LSF for more information about checkpointing in LSF.
◆ Platform LSF
◆ FLUENT 5 or higher, available from Fluent Incorporated.
◆ Hardware vendor-supplied MPI environment for network computing to use the
“vmpi” version of FLUENT 5.
Configuring LSF for FLUENT jobs
During installation, lsfinstall adds the Boolean resource fluent to the Resource
section of
lsf.shared.
LSF also installs the
echkpnt.fluent and erestart.fluent files in
LSF_SERVERDIR.
If only some of your hosts can accept FLUENT jobs, configure the Host section of
lsf.cluster. cluster_name to identify those hosts.
Edit
LSF_ENVDIR/conf/lsf.cluster.cluster_name file and add the fluent
resource to the hosts that can run FLUENT jobs:
Begin Host
HOSTNAME model type server r1m mem swp RESOURCES
...
hostA ! ! 1 3.5 () () ()
hostB ! ! 1 3.5 () () (fluent)
hostC ! ! 1 3.5 () () ()
...
End Host
Checkpointing in FLUENT
FLUENT 5 is integrated with LSF to use the LSF checkpointing capability. At the end
of each iteration, FLUENT looks for the existence of a checkpoint file (
check) or a
checkpoint exit file (
exit). If it detects the checkpoint file, it writes a case and data file,
removes the checkpoint file, and continues iterating. If it detects a checkpoint exit file,
it writes a case and data file, then exits.
Use the
bchkpnt command to create the checkpoint and checkpoint exit files, which
forces FLUENT to checkpoint, or checkpoint and exit itself. FLUENT also creates a
journal file with instructions to read the checkpointed case and data files, and continue
iterating. FLUENT uses this file when it is restarted with the
brestart command.