Using LSF with MSC Nastran

MSC Nastran Version 70.7.2 ("Nastran") runs in a Distributed Parallel mode, and automatically detects a job launched by LSF, and transparently accepts the execution host information from LSF. The Nastran application checks if the LSB_HOSTS or LSB_MCPU_HOSTS environment variable is set in the execution environment. If either is set, Nastran uses the value of the environment variable to produce a list of execution nodes for the solver command line. Users can override the hosts chosen by LSF to specify their own host list.

Configuring LSF for Nastran

To configure LSF for Nastran:

LSF HPC features must be enabled.
Nastran version 70.7.2 and higher, available from MSC Software, must be installed.

During installation, lsfinstall adds the Boolean resource nastran to the Resource section of lsf.shared. No additional executable files are needed.

If only some of your hosts can accept Nastran 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 nastran resource to the hosts that can run Nastran jobs:

Begin Host
HOSTNAME    model   type  server  r1m   mem   swp  RESOURCES
...
hostA       !       !       1     3.5   ()    ()   ()
hostB       !       !       1     3.5   ()    ()   (nastran)
hostC       !       !       1     3.5   ()    ()   ()
...
End Host

Submitting Nastran jobs

Use bsub to submit the job, including parameters required for the Nastran command line:

bsub -n num_processors [-R nastran] bsub_options nastran_command

Where:

-n num_processors is the number of processors required to run the job.
-R nastran (optional) specifies the nastran shared resource if the Nastran application is only installed on certain hosts in the cluster.

You must set the Nastran dmp variable to the same number as the number of processors the job is requesting (-n option of bsub). For example:

For a parallel job through LSF requesting 4 processors:

% bsub -n 4 -a nastran -R "nastran" nastran example dmp=4

Note that both the bsub -n 4 and Nastran dmp=4 options are used. The value for -n and dmp must be the same.
For a parallel job through LSF requesting 4 processors, no more than 1 processor per host:

% bsub -n 4 -a nastran -R "nastran span[ptile=1]"

nastran example dmp