FEKO

We assume you have installed FEKO, and for the following examples the installation directory will be FEKO_HOME=/opt/Altair/2017/altair/feko/

In addition you need to install the scripts vovrunfeko and runfeko_trojan in $VOVDIR/eda/Altair.

Create Environment FEKO

The installation comes with a BASH script in $FEKO_HOME/bin/initfeko. This script works only with Bash shells. With Accelerator, it always makes sense to have a named environment, called for example "FEKO", which can be used with any shell.

# This is file $VOVDIR/local/environments/FEKO.start.bash
. /opt/Altair/2017/altair/feko/bin/initfeko
export PATH=`vovenv PREPEND -colon $VOVDIR/eda/Altair $PATH`

With such FEKO environment in place, you can switch to that environment regardless of the shell you are using, for example with the command:

% ves FEKO
% ves BASE+FEKO

Submission from the Command Line

From the command line, you can submit runfeko directly if you only need to run on a single machine:

% nc run -e FEKO -r RAM/2000 CORES/4 -- runfeko myexample -np 4

If you want to run on multiple machines, that is in DP mode (DP=Distributed Parallel), then you can submit the script vovrunfeko, which takes all options passed to runfeko. Do not bother with the machinesfile or the -np option; the script vovrunfeko takes care of those options. Example:

% nc run -dp 16 -profile vovrunfeko myexample

You can also use vovrunfeko for jobs that use a single machine, as in this example:

% nc run -e FEKO -r RAM/2000 CORES/4 -- runfeko myexample

Submit from the CADFEKO User Interface wit a "Trojan Horse"

Currently, it is not natively possible to submit FEKO jobs to a scheduler directly from the CADFEKO interface. However, this can be accomplished with Accelerator provided that runfeko is replaced by a trojan horse that we provide:

  % ves FEKO
  % cd $FEKO_HOME/bin
  % mv runfeko runfeko.bin                   ##### Make a copy of the original binary.
  % cp ...../runfeko_trojanhorse ./runfeko   ##### Place our trojan horse in place of runfeko.
  % chmod a+x ./runfeko

Now you can run the UI cadfeko and when you press the "FEKO solver ►" button, you will actually submit the run to Accelerator, with the requested level of parallelism.

Note: unfortunately, the "Stop" button does not work properly, and you may have to stop the job using nc stop JOBID from the command line.