Revision as of 19:48, 30 November 2007

What is ParaDiS and How to obtain a copy

ParaDiS is a free large scale dislocation dynamics simulation code to study the fundamental mechanisms of plasticity. It was originally developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is written in C (with a little C++) and uses the MPI library for communication between processors. It runs routinely on 100-1000 processors and scalability on 132,000 processors of BlueGene/L has been demonstrated.

You can go to http://paradis.stanford.edu to obtain a free copy of the source code of ParaDiS. You will need to requestion an account by submitting a username, a password and a brief description of yourself and your research interests. Once your account request is approved, you will receive a confirmation email and you can download the ParaDiS source code. The same web site also contains the documentation of the ParaDiS code, including tutorials and reference manuals.

The source file you obtain should look something like pub-dd3d.v.2.0.tar.gz. It is recommended that you create a ~/Codes directory and extract the source code there.

 cd ~/Codes
 tar zxvf pub-dd3d.v.2.0.tar.gz
 cd dd3dv2.0

This should create a ~/Codes/dd3dv2.0 directory. We will refer to it as $ParaDiS in the following.

How to compile ParaDiS

Go to $ParaDiS directory. You may need to edit the makefile.setup file. The most important variables are SYS and MODE. SYS specifies the type of your computer and MODE can be either SERIAL or PARALLEL. For example, suppose you want to compile ParaDiS on a Linux/Intel workstation with 1 processor. You want to set SYS = i386 and MODE = SERIAL in the makefile.setup file. Then, you can just type

 make dd3d

If there are some problems during compilation, you should then check in the makefile.setup file, whether the lines CC_SERIAL.i386, CPP_SERIAL.i386, CCFLAG_SERIAL.i386, CPPFLAG_SERIAL.i386 the correct C/C++ compilers are specified according to your computer's setting.