Cluster Docs

LIGGGHTS stands for “LAMMPS Improved for General Granular and Granular Heat Transfer Simulations”. It is an open-source Discrete Element Method (DEM) particle simulation software used for modeling granular material behaviors.

The software deployed on this cluster is compiled directly from the official baseline repository hosted at GitHub - CFDEMproject/LIGGGHTS-PUBLIC.

To list all installed LIGGGHTS versions, run the command module spider liggghts.

For example, to access the version 3.8.0 and its dependencies, load the module using:

module load GCC/14.3.0 OpenMPI/5.0.8 LIGGGHTS/3.8.0

The following batch script is optimized for parallel execution on the newest cluster compute nodes available via the partition mpp.share. Resources are defined via --ntasks-per-node, and the parallel execution is performed via MPI using standard input redirection (<).

liggghts_parallel_job.sh

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=liggghts_job
#SBATCH --output=liggghts_%j.log
#SBATCH --error=liggghts_%j.err
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=128
#SBATCH --mem-per-cpu=3500
#SBATCH --time=12:00:00
#SBATCH --partition=mpp.share
#SBATCH --mail-type=BEGIN,END,FAIL
 
# Load the module
module load GCC/14.3.0 OpenMPI/5.0.8 LIGGGHTS/3.8.0
 
# Change to simulation workspace directory
cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR
 
# Note: Replace "input.liggghts" with your actual input file name
mpirun -np $SLURM_NTASKS liggghts < input.liggghts

Simulation data is natively written directly into VTK files, eliminating the need for separate post-processing conversion scripts (such as the legacy LPP script).

To analyze and animate your particle simulation results, one convenient option is to use the interactive ParaView App available directly through the cluster's Open OnDemand web interface. Alternatively, you can launch the Remote Desktop App via Open OnDemand or connect the cluster using the X2Go client, and then activate ParaView by loading the appropriate module inside a terminal window. Once ParaView is open, the sequential VTK file series can be loaded directly to render and color the granular particle structures.