FDS

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a large-eddy simulation (LES) code for low-speed flows, with an emphasis on smoke and heat transport from fires. FDS Homepage

Available Modules

module load FDS/6.7.5-1526-intel-2020a

Warning

FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for large-eddy simulation (LES) of low-speed flows, with an emphasis on smoke and heat transport from fires.

General documentation can be found here.

FDS can utilise both MPI and OpenMP

Example Script

#!/bin/bash -e

#SBATCH --time           02:00:00       #Walltime
#SBATCH --ntasks         4              #One task per mesh, NO MORE
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task  2              #More than 4 cpus/task not recommended.
#SBATCH --output         %x.out     #Name output file according to job name
#SBATCH --hint           nomultithread  #Hyperthreading decreases efficiency.

module load FDS/6.7.1-intel-2017a

input="/nesi/project/nesi99999/path/to/input.fds"

srun fds ${input}

Recommendations

• FDS will run in Hybrid Parallel, but will be less efficient that full MPI using the same number of CPUs.
• MPI if the preferable method of scaling, if you can partition your mesh more you should do that before considering multi-threading (OpenMP). e.g. ntasks=2, cpus-per-task=1 is preferable to ntasks=1, cpus-per-task=2
• Each mesh should have it's own task, assigning more tasks than there are meshes will cause an error.
• Multi-threading efficiency drops off significantly after 4 physical cores. --cpus-per-task 4
• Hyper-threading is not recommended. Set --hint nomultithread

Scaling with MPI

Scaling with oMP