Lumerical job scheduler integration configuration (Slurm, Torque, LSF, SGE)

Overview

This guide covers how to integrate the CAD Job Manager with the most popular job schedulers. After following these steps, running a simulation on a cluster will be just as seamless as running it on your local computer. You will be able to just click “Run” and the job will automatically be submitted to the job schedulers queue (the file will be transferred if necessary), the Lumerical Job Manager will periodically update with the simulations current state and progress, and upon completion, the results will be automatically loaded in your current CAD session.

See also: Job scheduler submission scripts (SGE, Slurm, Torque) for additional details and sample submission scripts for the supported job schedulers.

Known Limitations

The job manager options: Quit, Quit & Save, and Force Quit, are currently not supported.

Requirements

• Lumerical Products 2020a R3 (or newer)
• Cluster with either: Slurm, Torque, LSF, SGE, X11-Display, Lumerical products installed with license server configured.  If using AWS ParallelCluster, see AWS-ParallelCluster documentation for details.

Resource Configuration

1. Add/edit a new resource, set the capacity to either 0 (inf) if the queue is already configured to handle the number of available licenses, or to the maximum number of available engine licenses on the license server:

   

2. Edit the advanced resource settings, select your job scheduler from the "Job Launching Presets":
   

Notes:

• The preset is automatically populated with the defaults for AWS ParallelCluster.
• You may need to modify the submission command with the proper number of nodes and processes per node, as well as update the submission script to set a Lumerical compute environment appropriate for your cluster.

(Beta) Launching Lumerical Jobs on a Remote Cluster From Your Local Computer

If you would like to launch jobs from your local computer for a more seamless experience, you can configure FDTD Solutions on your local computer following the same steps as above and enable ssh in the respective submission script file:

This method will copy your .fsp file to the remote server using scp*, launch the job with ssh*/qsub, and copy all the generated files back to your local computer at the end.

Note:  Windows users will have to install Git Bash (ensure SSH and SCP are added to the system's PATH).

Results

You can now run any Lumerical simulation (single, sweeps, optimizations, etc.) directly from the CAD's Job Manager.