FDTD/Setup
Please note that for using FDTD on the Euler cluster, there are some initialization steps that you need to do first.
Prerequisites
FDTD is a commercial software, requires a license. In order to use it on Euler, you need to purchase a license through the IT shop of ETH to get the licensing information that is required to configure your account on Euler for FDTD. If you are using a Windows computer you also need to setup an X11 server. FDTD solutions has been tested with Cygwin/x (x11 and ssh packages required) whereas some problems occured with Xming. Therefore we recommend to use Cygwin/x as X11 server when using a Windows computer.
Preparing the environment
As you need to load 4 different modules to prepare the environment for running FDTD Solutions, we recommend to create an alias in your $HOME/.bash_profile file. For this, open the .bash_profile in a text editor and add the two following lines:
# fdtd modules alias fdtdm="module load new open_mpi/1.6.5 fdtd/8.11 matlab/8.2"
The changes will become active if you open a shell next time. If you want to use the alias already in the current shell session, then please type:
source $HOME/.bash_profile
Before you start an interactive FDTD session or submit a batch job, you have to type fdtdm to load all the required modules.
Setting up the license configuration
For setting up the license configuration, you need to login to the Euler cluster with X11 forwarding enabled. Then you need to make sure that the necessary module are loaded as described above. When starting the graphical user interface with the command fdtd-solutions, you will be asked to provide information about the license server. Please specify then the license information (hostname, port) that you were provided by IDES, when purchasing your FDTD Licenses.
This license information will be stored in a hidden file ($HOME/.flexlmrc) in your home directory on Euler. If you ever need to change the license settings, then open this file in a text editor and delete the line that starts with LUMERICL_LICENSE_FILE= and repeat the steps described above.
