VASP
User documentation
VASP (Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package) is a popular software package for "atomic scale materials modelling from first principles". In general, it runs well on LUMI-C.
There is currently no version of VASP that can use the AMD GPUs in the GPU Early Access Platform or LUMI-G.
Installing VASP
We provide automatic installation scripts for several versions of VASP. In general, the installation procedure is described on the EasyBuild page. The step by step procedure to install VASP 6.3.2 is:
- Download the VASP source code "vasp.6.3.2.tgz" from the VASP portal.
- Upload the file somewhere to your home directory on LUMI.
- Load the LUMI software environment:
module load LUMI/22.08
. - Select the LUMI-C partition:
module load partition/C
. - Load the EasyBuild module:
module load EasyBuild-user
.
Then, you can run the install command:
The installation process is quite slow. It will take about 20 minutes, but afterwards, you will have a module called "VASP/6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.08" installed in your home directory. Load the module to use it
The usual VASP binaries, vasp_std
, vasp_gam
etc. will now be in your
PATH
. Launch VASP via the Slurm scheduler, e.g. srun
vasp_std
. Please note that you must do module load LUMI/22.08 partition/C
to
see the VASP module in the module system. The same applies to the Slurm batch
scripts which you send to the compute nodes.
You can see other versions of VASP that can be automatically installed in the same way by running the EasyBuild command
or by checking the list further down this page or by checking the LUMI-EasyBuild-contrib repository on GitHub directly.
We build the VASP executables with bindings to several external libraries activated: currently HDF5, Wannier90, DFTD4, and Libxc.
Example batch scripts
A typical VASP batch job using 4 compute nodes and MPI only:
##!/bin/bash
##SBATCH -J GaAs512
##SBATCH -N 4
##SBATCH --partition=small
##SBATCH -t 00:30:00
##SBATCH --mem=200G
##SBATCH --exclusive --no-requeue
##SBATCH -A project_XYZ
##SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=128
##SBATCH -c 1
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
module load LUMI/22.08 partition/C
module load VASP/6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.08
srun vasp_std
A typical VASP batch job with MPI and 8 OpenMP threads per rank:
##!/bin/bash
##SBATCH -J GaAs512
##SBATCH -N 4
##SBATCH --partition=small
##SBATCH -t 00:30:00
##SBATCH --mem=200G
##SBATCH --exclusive --no-requeue
##SBATCH -A project_XYZ
##SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=16
##SBATCH -c 8
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8
export OMP_PLACES=cores
export OMP_PROC_BIND=close
export OMP_STACKSIZE=512m
module load LUMI/22.08 partition/C
module load VASP/6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.08
srun vasp_std
Tuning recommendations
Note
Due to the restrictive license conditions imposed by the VASP group, which forbids sharing of any kind of benchmark numbers with anyone (including other licensed users!), we unfortunately cannot give detailed recommendations on the best way to run VASP.
- In general, try increasing
NCORE
to 16-32, andNSIM
to 32. - OpenMP works best with many threads, eg.
OMP_NUM_THREADS=8
. - It is best to run with all 128 processor cores per compute node if you can, but reducing the number of cores per compute node does not decrease performance as much as you might expect. That can be useful when you are constrained by memory and need more available memory per MPI rank. It is important to explicitly pin the MPI ranks to processor cores if you run with less than 128 cores per node.
- If possible, use k-point parallelization
KPAR
up to the maxium number of k-points. It is often a good choice to use 1 compute node per k-point.
User-installable modules (and EasyConfigs)
Install with the EasyBuild-user module:
To access module help after installation and get reminded for which stacks and partitions the module is installed, usemodule spider VASP/<version>
.
EasyConfig:
- VASP/5.4.4.pl2-cpeGNU-21.08 (EasyConfig: VASP-5.4.4.pl2-cpeGNU-21.08.eb)
- VASP/5.4.4.pl2-cpeGNU-21.12 (EasyConfig: VASP-5.4.4.pl2-cpeGNU-21.12.eb)
- VASP/6.2.1-cpeGNU-21.08 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.2.1-cpeGNU-21.08.eb)
- VASP/6.2.1-cpeGNU-21.09 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.2.1-cpeGNU-21.09.eb)
- VASP/6.3.0-cpeGNU-21.08 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.3.0-cpeGNU-21.08.eb)
- VASP/6.3.0-cpeGNU-21.12 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.3.0-cpeGNU-21.12.eb)
- VASP/6.3.0-cpeGNU-22.06 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.3.0-cpeGNU-22.06.eb)
- VASP/6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.06 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.06.eb)
- VASP/6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.08 (EasyConfig: VASP-6.3.2-cpeGNU-22.08.eb)