MSC Nastran Example

MSC Nastran is a multidisciplinary structural analysis application used by engineers to perform static, dynamic, and thermal analysis across the linear and nonlinear domains, complemented with automated structural optimization and embedded fatigue analysis technologies, all enabled by high performance computing. Complex MSC Nastran models can be conveniently run on Rescale’s ScaleX platform across multiple cores to achieve speed up and lower run times.

MSC Nastran is based on sophisticated numerical methods, the most prominent being the Finite Element Method. Nonlinear FE problems may be solved with built-in implicit numerical techniques. A number of optimization algorithms are available, including MSCADS and IPOPT.

MSC Nastran is a memory dependent software and users have to make sure that sufficient memory is allotted to MSC Nastran resources (Solver OpenCore, Buffer Pool, Scratch memory etc) to make sure the job runs faster. The command line settings are very much dependent on the model and the solution type. MSC Nastran jobs can be solved using Shared Memory Parallelization (SMP) and Distributed Memory Parallelization (DMP) settings. Users are recommended to refer the MSC Nastran HPC Guide for optimal settings depending on the model size and the solution type.

SOL 101 Example

This is a Linear Static Structural analysis of a car model with 7,000,000+ DOF. The following example is run using 2018.1 version of MSC Nastran with the options : solve=auto, which selects the best solver and cpumax=N_cores, which selects the best combination of SMP and DMP (Only if solve=auto is specified).

msc20181 nastran xx0ost0.dat mem=100gb memorymax=100gb solve=auto cpumax=$RESCALE_CORES_SLOT scratch=yes bat=no sdir=/tmp