Tecplot360

Contents

• Summary and Version Information
• Running in batch mode

Summary and Version Information

Notes:
^*: Packages labelled as "available" on an HPC cluster means that it can be used on the compute nodes of that cluster. Even software not listed as available on an HPC cluster is generally available on the login nodes of the cluster (assuming it is available for the appropriate OS version; e.g. RedHat Linux 6 for the two Deepthought clusters). This is due to the fact that the compute nodes do not use AFS and so have copies of the AFS software tree, and so we only install packages as requested. Contact us if you need a version listed as not available on one of the clusters.

In general, you need to prepare your Unix environment to be able to use this software. To do this, either:

• tap TAPFOO

• module load MODFOO

where TAPFOO and MODFOO are one of the tags in the tap and module columns above, respectively. The tap command will print a short usage text (use -q to supress this, this is needed in startup dot files); you can get a similar text with module help MODFOO. For more information on the tap and module commands.

For packages which are libraries which other codes get built against, see the section on compiling codes for more help.

Tap/module commands listed with a version of current will set up for what we considered the most current stable and tested version of the package installed on the system. The exact version is subject to change with little if any notice, and might be platform dependent. Versions labelled new would represent a newer version of the package which is still being tested by users; if stability is not a primary concern you are encouraged to use it. Those with versions listed as old set up for an older version of the package; you should only use this if the newer versions are causing issues. Old versions may be dropped after a while. Again, the exact versions are subject to change with little if any notice.

In general, you can abbreviate the module tags. If no version is given, the default current version is used. For packages with compiler/MPI/etc dependencies, if a compiler module or MPI library was previously loaded, it will try to load the correct build of the package for those packages. If you specify the compiler/MPI dependency, it will attempt to load the compiler/MPI library for you if needed.

This is restrictively licensed software. You must obtain permission to use this software.

The University does NOT have a site license for this product. The Departments of Aeronautical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering have purchased a site-license for the School of Engineering. You can contact the IT coordinators of either of these departments to see if they will add you to the list of approved users.

Running in batch mode

Although tecplot360 has a nice GUI mode, at times it is desirable to run tecplot in "batch" mode, where all input is provided from a command line or files and no GUI is started. In particular, when submitting jobs to an HPC cluster, one typically wants to run tecplot from within in shell script.

To run tecplot360 in batch mode, you need to create a macro file (*.mcr) containing the tecplot commands you wish to run. Then you invoke tecplot360 with the -b flag (for batch mode) and the -p to provide the name of the macro file. So if your tecplot commands are stored in the macro file myscript.mcr, you would give the command

tec360 -b -p myscript.mcr

Note that tecplot360 macro files do not accept command line parameters. This can be a nuissance in some situations where in you would like to run the same tecplot commands multiple times only changing a small number of parameters. The standard work around in this case is to assign the parameter value to a shell environmental variable and then have your tecplot macro file set a tecplot variable from the environmental variable. E.g., if you wish to set the variable MYPARM in the macro variable based on the environmental variable myparm, then first set the environmental variable (using something like setenv myparm 100 for tcsh-style shells or export myparm=100 for bash and Bourne style shells) and then in your tecplot macro do something like

$!VarSet |MYPARM|='|$myparm|'

The above can all be combined into a job submission script for the HPC, e.g

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -n 1
#SBATCH -t 30
#SBATCH --mem 6000

. ~/.profile
module load tecplot360

myparm=100
export myparm
date

tec360 -b -p myscript.mcr

date