STAR-CCM+

STAR-CCM+ provides the world’s most comprehensive engineering physics simulation inside a single integrated package. Much more than a CFD code, STAR‑CCM+ provides an engineering process for solving problems involving flow (of fluids and solids), heat transfer and stress. STAR‑CCM+ is unrivalled in its ability to tackle problems involving multi‑physics and complex geometries.  Support is provided by CD-adapco. CD-adapco usually releases new version of STAR-CCM+ every four months.

Availability and Restrictions

Versions

STAR-CCM+ is available on the Owens Cluster. The versions currently available at OSC are:

Version Owens
11.02.010 X
11.06.011 X
12.04.010 X
12.06.010 X
13.02.011 X
13.04.011 X
14.02.010 X
14.04.013 X
15.02.007 X*
15.06.008 X
16.02.008 X
17.02.007 X
18.02.010 X
18.04.008 X
18.06.006 X
* Current default version

We have STAR-CCM+ Academic Pack, which includes STAR-CCM+, STAR-innovate, CAD Exchange, STAR-NX, STAR-CAT5, STAR-Inventor, STAR-ProE, JTOpen Reader, EHP, Admixturs, Vsim, CAT, STAR-ICE, Battery Design Studio, Sattery Simulation Module, SPEED, SPEED/Enabling PC-FEA, SPEED/Optimate, DARS, STAR-CD, STAR-CD/Reactive Flow Models, STAR-CD/Motion, esiece, and pro-STAR.

You can use module spider starccm  to view available modules for a given machine. The default versions are in double precision. Please check with module spider starccm  to see if there is a mixed precision version available. Feel free to contact OSC Help if you need other versions for your work.

Access for Academic Users

Academic users can use STAR-CCM+ on OSC machines if the user or user's institution has proper STAR-CCM+ license. Currently, users from Ohio State University, University of Cincinnati, University of Akron, and University of Toledo can access the OSC's license.

Use of STAR-CCM+ for academic purposes requires validation. In order to obtain validation, please contact OSC Help for further instruction. 

Currently, OSC has a 80 seat license (ccmpsuite, which allows up to 80 concurrent users), with 4,000 HPC licenses (DOEtoken) for academic users. 

Access for Commercial Users

Contact OSC Help for getting access to STAR-CCM+ if you are a commercial user.

Publisher/Vendor/Repository and License Type

Siemens, Commercial

Usage

Usage on Owens

Set-up on Owens

We recommend to run STAR-CCM+ on only the compute nodes. Thus, all STAR-CCM+ jobs should be submitted via the batch scheduling system, either as interactive or non-interactive batch jobs. To load the default version of STAR-CCM+ module on Owens, use  module load starccm . To select a particular software version, use   module load starccm/version . For example, use  module load starccm/11.02.010  to load STAR-CCM+ version 11.02.010 on Owens.

Batch Usage on Owens

When you log into owens.osc.edu you are actually logged into a linux box referred to as the login node. To gain access to the mutiple processors in the computing environment, you must submit your STAR-CCM+ analysis to the batch system for execution. Batch jobs can request mutiple nodes/cores and compute time up to the limits of the OSC systems. Refer to Queues and Reservations and Batch Limit Rules for more info.  Batch jobs run on the compute nodes of the system and not on the login node. It is desirable for big problems since more resources can be used. STAR-CCM+ can be run on OSC clusters in either interactive mode or in non-interactive batch mode.

Interactive Batch Session

Interactive mode is similar to running STAR-CCM+ on a desktop machine in that the graphical user interface (GUI) will be sent from OSC and displayed on the local machine. To run interactive STAR-CCM+, it is suggested to request necessary compute resources from the login node, with X11 forwarding. The intention is that users can run STAR-CCM+ interactively for the purpose of building their model, preparing input file (.sim file), and checking results. Once developed this input file can then be run in no-interactive batch mode. For example, the following line requests one node with 28 cores( -N 1 -n 28 ), for a walltime of one hour ( -t 1:00:00 ), with one STAR-CCM+ base license token ( -L starccm@osc:1 ) on Owens:

sinteractive -N 1 -n 28 -t 1:00:00 -L starccm@osc:1

This job will queue until resources become available. Once the job is started, you're automatically logged in on the compute node; and you can launch STAR-CCM+ GUI with the following commands:

module load starccm
starccm+ -mesa
Non-interactive Batch Job (Serial Run using 1 Base Token)

batch script can be created and submitted for a serial or parallel run. You can create the batch script using any text editor you like in a working directory on the system of your choice.

Below is the example batch script ( job.txt ) for a serial run with an input file ( starccm.sim ) on Owens:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=starccm_test
#SBATCH --time=1:00:00
#SBATCH --nodes=1 --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH -L starccm@osc:1

cd $TMPDIR  
cp $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR/starccm.sim .  
module load starccm  
starccm+ -batch starccm.sim >&output.txt  
cp output.txt $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

To run this job on OSC batch system, the above script is to be submitted with the command:

sbatch job.txt
Non-interactive Batch Job (Parallel Run using HPC Tokens)

To take advantage of the powerful compute resources at OSC, you may choose to run distributed STAR-CCM+ for large problems. Multiple nodes and cores can be requested to accelerate the solution time. The following shows an example script if you need 2 nodes with 28 cores per node on Owens using the inputfile named   starccm.sim   :

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=starccm_test
#SBATCH --time=3:00:00
#SBATCH --nodes=2 --ntasks-per-node=28
#SBATCH -L starccm@osc:1,starccmpar@osc:55

cp starccm.sim $TMPDIR
cd $TMPDIR
module load starccm 

srun hostname | sort -n > ${SLURM_JOB_ID}.nodelist

starccm+ -np 56 -batch -machinefile ${SLURM_JOB_ID}.nodelist -mpi openmpi starccm.sim >&output.txt 
cp output.txt $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR

In addition to requesting the STAR-CCM+ base license token ( -L starccm@osc:1 ), you need to request copies of the  starccmpar  license, i.e., HPC tokens ( -L starccm@osc:1,starccmpar@osc:[n] ), where [n] is equal to the number of cores minus 1.

We recommand using openmpi for your parallel jobs. Especially, 17.02.007 version would not work with intelmpi

Known Issues

Update: 03/21/2022 
Version: 15.02.007, 15.02.007-mixed

STAR-CCM+ 15.02.007 and 15.02.007-mixed with intelMPI would fail on multiple node jobs after the downtime on Mar 22, 2022. Please use openmpi instead. 

starccm+ -np $SLURM_NTASKS -batch -machinefile ${SLURM_JOB_ID}.nodelist -mpi openmpi {your-input-file}
Update: 05/24/2022 
Version: 17.02.007 
Issue: large parallel jobs fails randomly

Large parallel jobs with STAR-CCM+ 17.02.007 may fail with openmpi provided by Starccm+ installations. Please call openmpi installed by OSC instead as:  

...
module load starccm/17.02.007
module load openmpi/4.0.3-hpcx
export OPENMPI_DIR=/usr/local/openmpi/intel/19.0/4.0.3-hpcx
srun hostname | sort -n > ${SLURM_JOB_ID}.nodelist
...
starccm+ -np $SLURM_NTASKS -batch -machinefile ${SLURM_JOB_ID}.nodelist -mpi openmpi {your-input-file}...
...
Update: 04/24/2023 
Version: 18.02.010 
Issue: IntelMPI not supported on glibc 2.17. Use OpenMPI instead.

See Also

Supercomputer: 
Service: