FDTD

LUMERICAL
Description: Providing photonic and optoelectronic TCAD device simulation and photonic integrated circuit design products
SHARCNET Package information: see LUMERICAL software page in web portal
Full list of SHARCNET supported software

Licensing Information

As of February 2013, SHARCNET no long holds the FDTD Solutions (also known as front end or GUI) licence. Users who need to use FDTD Solutions for their model construction and data analysis must obtain their own licences.

Thanks to the kind donation of FDTD Engine licences by Lumerical solutions, Inc., SHARCNET will continue to support the serial farming and parallel processing of FDTD simulations on SHARCNET systems.

Version Changes

The latest release is 8.5.3 and this is the only version supported. The licences to the older versions have expired.

Note the FDTD engines are the only components that are supported. We no longer have the licence for the frontend FDTD Solutions.

The Workflow

It is assumed that users prepare their simulation files on their own computers with FDTD Solutions and then carry on large scale simulations--being large number of cases or large size of problems that are not feasible on their computers--on SHARCNET systems through serial farming or parallel processing. Typically this will involve transferring simulation files to SHARCNET and copying computed results back to their local computers for analysis.

To transfer data between one's computers and SHARCNET systems, one may use the common secure file transfer client software such as SSH Secure File Transfer Client, WinSCP, putty-sftp, etc. Users are referred to the tutorials on using these tools.

Loading Lumerical and Support Library Modules

Before you can run Lumerical, you must load the Lumerical module:

module load lumerical

As well one must perform the following

module unload openmpi intel compile
module load gcc/4.3.4
module load openmpi/gcc/1.4.2

Before You Go The First Time

Before you run Lumerical simulations for the first time, remove the existing configuration file in your home directory, if any:

cd ~/.config
rm FDTD\ Solutions.ini

This cleans the cached or corrupted Lumerical licencing infomation for previous versions.

Using FDTD Solutions GUI CAD

As of February 2013, SHARCNET no longer has the licence to the front end GUI (CAD for Linux).

Submitting A Serial Job

One must load necessary modules before submitting a job. Loading a module sets the environment variables needed for the running executables. The environment variables set will be inherited on the compute nodes automatically

module load lumerical
sqsub -q serial -r 1.5h output%J fdtd-engine-mpich2nem simulation.fsp

Submitting A Parallel Job

Starting with version 7 the lumerical module must be loaded first before submitting a job or running the CAD command for instance as follows:

module load lumerical
sqsub -q mpi -r 1.5h -n num_procs -o output%J fdtd-engine-ompi-lcl parallel_simulation.fsp

For further details about Distributed simulation testing please refer to the documentation on Lumerical's web site which can be found here[1].

See also Lumerical's User Guide