ABAQUS is a finite element program specifically designed for structural
engineering problems, with additional modules for computational
fluid dynamics and for electromagnetic problems.

ABAQUS is licensed software, and users wishing to access it must apply
for authorization. The basic process involves having the user’s
department head contact Mark Roope (mroope@vt.edu) of the Virginia Tech
Information Technology Procurement and Licensing group. In this way,
a license pack can be purchased, and the department head given
a group in the openldap directory. Departmental users can
than be granted access by the department head, using the
group manager tool located at


Web site:




On any ARC cluster, check the installation details
by typing “module spider abaqus”.

ABAQUS requires that the appropriate modules be loaded before it can be run.
One version of the appropriate commands for use on NewRiver is:

module purge
module load abaqus/6.14_4


  • If you encounter the message

    ERROR: An error occurred during a write access to /tmp/….
    Check the disk space on your system

    this is because ABAQUS has filled up the directory in which it stores
    its temporary files. By default, /tmp is used for those
    files, which may not be large enough for some jobs. The solution is to
    add a scratch=somepath flag to the ABAQUS call,
    where somepath is the path where you want the temporary
    files kept. This might be $WORK or $SCRATCH,
    for instance. You can check the size of /tmp on a given
    system by using the command df -h /tmp (in a job submission
    script if you want to check the size on a compute node).

  • If an Abaqus job is starting, according to the scheduler, but the job
    is not running, it may be because the job cannot check out enough
    licenses to start computation on all of the cores that you have
    requested. This can be resolved by requesting the software in your
    submission script by adding ,software=abaqus to the
    -lnodes line. For example, if the line previously
    read #PBS -l nodes=1:ppn=8, it would now read:

              #PBS -l nodes=1:ppn=8,software=abaqus

    which will ensure that the job is not started until sufficient licenses
    are available. Once the appropriate module has been loaded,
    you can also check the availability of licenses by issuing the

              $ABAQUS_DIR/6.14-4/code/bin/lmstat -a -c 27000@abaqus.software.vt.edu


The following batch file runs ABAQUS on the input file adams.inp,
using 12 cores:

#! /bin/bash
#PBS -l walltime=0:05:00
#PBS -l nodes=1:ppn=12
#PBS -W group_list=newriver
#PBS -q open_q
#PBS -j oe
module purge
module load abaqus/6.14_4

abaqus job=adams cpus=12 interactive
