Abaqus works well under Centos but is much less likely to work well under a bleeding edge distro like Arch, so let's run Abaqus within a Singularity container, setting things up in such a way that we can run Abaqus CAE with hardware-accelerated (NVIDIA) graphics.
-
Make sure you have Singularity 2.4.2 installed.
-
Symlink the
.iso
installer for Abaqus 2017 into a clone of this repository. -
Ensure that the license server(s) listed in
assets/cae-UserIntentions_CODE.xml
(seelicenseServer1
/licenseServer2
/licenseServer3
in that file) are accessible i.e. if they are only reachable after bringing up a VPN connection, then bring that up now. -
If
/tmp
is 'small' (e.g. 'only' 16GB) then Singularity will run out of space when trying to build your Abaqus image, so you may want to create a directory somewhere else for Singularity to write temporary files to:mkdir -p -m 0700 $HOME/.cache/singularity
Right, let's start building our Singularity image. The build process as defined in our .def
file:
- Unpacks the installer ISO;
- Installs install-time and run-time OS dependencies. The run-time dependencies include VirtualGL and libjpeg-turbo.
- Kicks off the Abaqus installer, using 'UserIntentions' files to automate the install.
sudo SINGULARITY_TMPDIR=$HOME/.cache/singularity singularity build abaqus-2017-centos-7.img abaqus-2017-centos-7.def
To run Abaqus CAE with (NVIDIA) hardware-accelerated graphics:
singularity run --nv abaqus-2017-centos-7.img
which is equivalent to:
singularity exec --nv abaqus-2017-centos-7.img vglrun abaqus cae
I need to prefix the above command(s) with optirun
to ensure I use my NVIDIA GPU and not my on-board graphics chip.
Alternatively, to run Abaqus without hardware-accelerated graphics:
singularity exec --nv abaqus-2017-centos-7.img abaqus cae -mesa
These were produced by going through the Abaqus install process interactively within a Singularity 'sandbox' (writable directory-based container):
pushd some/dir
tar xfp Abaqus2017.iso
popd
# Build a writable container in a directory called 'centos-7-abaqus-2017-singuarity-sandbox'
sudo singularity build --sandbox centos-7-abaqus-2017-singuarity-sandbox docker://centos:7
# Get a shell in that container
sudo singularity shell --bind some/dir:/iso-unpacked another/dir:/cfgs centos-7-abaqus-2017-singuarity-sandbox
# Within the container...
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7
yum install -y ksh redhat-lsb-core perl && yum clean all
cd /iso-unpacked
# Run the Abaqus installer
ksh 1/StartTUI.sh
# Find the '*UserIntentions* files generated during the install process and save them outside the container