6.4. Running a Batch Solver

The “MFiX Batch Solver” refers to the command line version of MFiX including MFiX 2016-1 and earlier versions. The “MFiX Interactive Solver” refers to all later releases of MFiX. The batch solver binary is not installed in the MFiX conda package; it needs to be compiled before being used (as in previous versions of MFiX).

Using the Batch Solver is appropriate when you do not want to use the interactive features with the GUI. You cannot pause, unpause, stop, or monitor status from the batch solver.

To build the batch solver see Building a Batch Solver.

6.4.1. Running (Serial)

To run a serial instance of the MFiX solver, type: .. code-block:: shell

> ./mfixsolver -f DES_FB1.mfx

6.4.2. Running with DMP

If you built the solver configured with DMP support, then you can run MPI jobs with the standard MPI wrapper command mpirun. For instance, to run using 4 cores with the domain divided along the X and Y axes:

> mpirun -np 4 ./mfixsolver -f DES_FB1.mfx NODESI=2 NODESJ=2

The number of MPI processes specified with -np must be equal to the product of the keywords NODESI*NODESJ*NODESK.

For further details on using mpirun, see the documentation for the MPI implementation for your system.

6.4.3. Running with SMP

If you built the solver configured with SMP support, then you can set the number of OpenMP threads using the OMP_NUM_THREADS environment variable. For instance, to run with four threads:

> env OMP_NUM_THREADS=4 ./mfixsolver -f DES_FB1.mfx